Tutorial: Leveraging Expandable Thunderbolt Video Storage with the G-Tech G-Dock ev

Connecting via Thunderbolt

Now connect the Thunderbolt cable from one Thunderbolt port to the computer (Figure 3, below). Then connect any other Thunderbolt- or Mini DisplayPort-equipped device to the other Thunderbolt port on the rear of the G-Dock.

Figure 3. Connecting the G-Dock to a MacBook Pro via Thunderbolt.

Once the G-Dock is connected to your computer, the light on each G-Drive module will begin to pulse, indicating drive activity.

Formatting the Drives

If this is your first time using the G-Dock and G-Drive modules, it may be necessary to use Disk Utility to format the drives.

Disk Utility is also helpful for creating a RAID 0 or 1 setting (Figure 4, below). RAID 0 stripes content across the drives, making the overall throughput much faster than a single drive.

Figure 4. Creating a RAID set in Disk Utility. Click the image to see it at full size.

Testing G-Drive Speed

We tested the two 1TB G-Drive modules in a disk speed test app, using the 4GB file setting. Figure 5 (below) shows the results.

Figure 5. Disk speed test results in a RAID 0 configuration. Click the image to see it at full size.

The test results demonstrate that the G-Drive ev modules, combined together into RAID 0 in the G-Dock, impressively achieve over 250 MB/sec (Megabytes per second) writes and reads.

We also tested a single drive in the G-Dock, to see what speed we would get out of a single drive or two drives in the RAID 1 (Mirrored) configuration. Again the results (shown in Figure 6, below) were impressive, with the single G-Drive module yielding around 120 Megabytes per second of throughput on both reads and writes.

Figure 6. Disk speed test results in a RAID 1 configuration. Click the image to see it at full size.