G-technology - Is it really a premium storage product??

[Shaun Townend]

Hey guys, So a bunch of us no doubt use Gtech drives for post. As a brand I really like them and of course they are marketed towards the production market. That said has anyone ever had to deal with their support services in the instance of a failure or issue?

I'm 7 days into a drive failure on a brand new GRAID 16TB TB3 enclosure and only just one day ago where gtechnology able to get my claim in to the system due to technical issues. Thats 7 days of radio silence. Once in the system I've been told a replacement drive will take 2 weeks to ship to me.

Two weeks!??? Really? For a premium product this support seems sub-par to me.

Am i being ridiculous expecting more? I've tried to reach out to some Gtech induviduals via linkedin to escalate but have heard nada. These days its getting exceedingly more difficult to talk with those who can make things happen.

Has anyone else experienced this with Gtech? For a brand I use and really like I'm just wanting to know my investment in data on their products is worthwhile moving forward. Meanwhile my data is at risk and moving 8TB of data around is scary and time consuming enough to ensure its still safe.

Functional and sexy products attract customers while poor support usually repels them.

Hoping this isn't a common experience.

 

[Chad Lancaster]

Well they are owned by WD, so depending on what drive is in it then you can look up the drive failure statistics. After only 7 days I'm sure its covered under warranty. I wouldn't call it a premium product, it's more of a higher end prosumer/small shop product. Nothing terrible against it but its not a full fledged server rack company with 24/7/365 support that you pay big bucks for and expect that level of support from.

 

[Shaun Townend]

its not a full fledged server rack company with 24/7/365 support that you pay big bucks for and expect that level of support from.

Totally agree with you there.

I was in IT 16 years before filmmaking and next day replacement was just he norm. Of course, that is not realistic in this situation.
But I think a 4 day turnaround is not asking too much. After all data storage is what they do, right?

The brand is pitched so hard as a premium professional brand:

At G-Technology® we design some of the highest-performing and most reliable leading-edge storage solutions for end-to-end creative workflows.
From small portable and rugged drives to large, multi-bay RAID and NAS solutions, G-Technology – a Western Digital Corporation brand – is the powerful, premium storage solutions company focused on meeting the demanding requirements of the media and entertainment industry.


A 14-21 day turn around for a simple bare drive replacement seems pretty ridiculous to me and in no way reflects "demanding requirements".

So is this the norm for Gtech support? I know. Stuff fails. Its life. Just trying to gauge the situation.

Right now if I was to recommend Gtech to someone I'd say:

"Performance is great. Product feels and looks premium. But if something goes wrong your up the creek without a paddle. So if you want to be safe by two of everything cause you'll be waiting a while."

 

[Brian Timmons]

Totally agree with you there.


A 14-21 day turn around for a simple bare drive replacement seems pretty ridiculous to me and in no way reflects "demanding requirements".

So is this the norm for Gtech support? I know. Stuff fails. Its life. Just trying to gauge the situation.

Right now if I was to recommend Gtech to someone I'd say:

"Performance is great. Product feels and looks premium. But if something goes wrong your up the creek without a paddle. So if you want to be safe by two of everything cause you'll be waiting a while."

The radio silence sounds familiar.
I saw this change in their tech support as early as 2009 which was around the time they were bought out.
It took me over a month to get a drive fixed (firewire port blew out) that was under warranty.

I think Gtech is largely floating on past reputation and not actual service.
Things likely changed after they were bought out.

I actually have much better service with a company like OWC particularly regarding storage and the like.

Brian Timmons
BRITIM/MEDIA

 

[Shaun Townend]

Thanks for the feedback Brian.:thumbup1:

 

[Brian Timmons]

Glad to give the feedback.
That was the last Gtech drive I bought as the values associated with the name didn't match.
Maybe more from the community can share these experiences and we can email them the thread.
I'm sure, like many companies, there are people at Gtech who care.

Brian Timmons
BRITIM/MEDIA

 

[Marc Wielage]

I have generally had good luck with G-Tech drives, but they're far from the best servers out there, even for small-scale post. Just today I had to update the software for a G-Tech Shuttle, and several of the support links on their own website are dead. That ain't a good sign. I got the thing up and running, but it was in spite of them, not because of them. Finding documentation on the website is also an exercise in frustration.

Having said that, on the rare occasions I've run into trouble, the support people I've dealt with on the phone have been pretty good and responsive. And I have not run into a catastrophic failure (yet).

 

[andrewhake]

Never had any issues with support from G-Tech. I have really liked their Shuttle TB3 RAID setups. I had one unit with an initial drive failure and was able to get a replacement in a reasonable amount of time with no nonsense from their support people. And the support people definitely knew how the device actually worked and weren't just going through a standard checklist of things to ask. Pretty standard RMA procedure.

I think you are definitely being a bit ridiculous. You aren't really paying a premium with their products and you definitely aren't paying for 24/7 support and immediate replacements.

"reached out to some Gtech individuals via linkedin to escalate"..

wtf.

 

[Dermot Shane]

i'd echo most of the above, they are not "premium" by 2018 standards, if you need NEED 24/7 there's options, not cheap tho.. Gtech does not really play in that world, prosumer seems more the target audience

i've had DiT's love them, want them, order them.. all good, that's really a disposable, amorted to a given film not a long term working tool

i would not place them in my racks, prefering to use real solid server class solutions, in my case Dell MD arrays on SAS, but the MD's would be a disaster on set where the prosumer focused Gtech shines

the first thing i do is pull every byte of data off the Gtech and put it on something more stable, solid and fast, mothball the Gtech array untill the show is done, and send it back to production, i just do not trust them as far can throw them, and i can't throw them very far ;-)

 

[Shaun Townend]

I think you are definitely being a bit ridiculous. You aren't really paying a premium with their products and you definitely aren't paying for 24/7 support and immediate replacements.
wtf.

Ridiculous andrewhake? I dont think so. 24/7 Support? Never mentioned or expect that from them. Maybe you should re-read my post.

"able to get a replacement in a reasonable amount of time"
What do you classify as reasonable amount of time?

A single basic hard drive replacement in 4 days? Totally realistic. 3 weeks. Bollocks.

Dermot, Agree they are not server class. but FWIW the marketing spin is real hence this conversation to get the real lay of the land when it comes to what I do moving forward.

 

[Misha Engel]

Hey guys, So a bunch of us no doubt use Gtech drives for post. As a brand I really like them and of course they are marketed towards the production market. That said has anyone ever had to deal with their support services in the instance of a failure or issue?

I'm 7 days into a drive failure on a brand new GRAID 16TB TB3 enclosure and only just one day ago where gtechnology able to get my claim in to the system due to technical issues. Thats 7 days of radio silence. Once in the system I've been told a replacement drive will take 2 weeks to ship to me.

Two weeks!??? Really? For a premium product this support seems sub-par to me.

Am i being ridiculous expecting more? I've tried to reach out to some Gtech induviduals via linkedin to escalate but have heard nada. These days its getting exceedingly more difficult to talk with those who can make things happen.

Has anyone else experienced this with Gtech? For a brand I use and really like I'm just wanting to know my investment in data on their products is worthwhile moving forward. Meanwhile my data is at risk and moving 8TB of data around is scary and time consuming enough to ensure its still safe.

Functional and sexy products attract customers while poor support usually repels them.

Hoping this isn't a common experience.

When you buy a raid-system always buy atleast one spare drive.
When you run it as JBOD or raid-5 you're playing with fire (you might loose a lot of data at some time).

Atleast 1 of every 300 spinning drives breakdown within a year.

 

[Shaun Townend]

When you buy a raid-system always buy atleast one spare drive.
When you run it as JBOD or raid-5 you're playing with fire (you might loose a lot of data at some time).

Atleast 1 of every 300 spinning drives breakdown within a year.

True. Everything breaks. This is more about after sales support though and if it matches up with the Premium tagline.

 

[Tim Gerhard]

I agree that you should always have a spare drive sitting around for your RAID. G-Tech uses Hitachi drives inside, which are pretty solid.

If you need Thunderbolt, then I'd suggest getting Areca and using your own drives instead of being forced into G-Tech drives.

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

What's in a name?

What's in a name?

Count me as an interested party in this subject. I swore by G-Tech from 2006-2113 but haven't bought a new one since. Didn't have any major problems, just started balking at the cost vs drives that tested just as well. I also found some decent tool less enclosures and deals on bare drives too good to resist.

IAC, these days, I live on those little Samsung external SSDs with USB-C port. R/W is typically around 500MB/s (30GB/min, 1TB/32min) which is a good match for current bus standards, RedMag read speed, etc. Sure, there are some much faster solutions (M.2 RAIDs anyone), but all of them have a penalty - cost, TDP, size, RAID overhead - that I'm only willing to bear when I'm damn sure the rest of the system can take proper advantage.

Perhaps the more interesting discussion is where the various options fall these days in terms of price/performance ratios. Around the time that NLEs became ubiquitous, G-Tech siezed the market for professional media creators who needed something better than off the shelf consumer products engineered primarily for low cost, and the heavy duty RAIDs used in facilities with IT support. Since then, the number of storage system vendors at shows like NAB, HD Expo, etc has gone off the chain.

What I see now is a messy marketplace where you may, or may not, get your money's worth. Many established brands have changed ownership in the background, then simply milked the brand equity. Is that what WD did with G-Tech? I don't have enough data to know the answer to that, but, it does seem to be a popular tactic these days.

Cheers - #19

 

[Matthew Riggieri]

Upfront, I am a G-Tech reseller. I have been for about a decade.

The reason on their reputation was so strong was that they used HGST drives. Then they were bought by HGST. If you look at the BackBlaze Long term Hard drives stats, HGST has by far the most minimal failure rate.

HGST was bought by WD. Most of the high end WD drives are built on the HGST technology. And those are still the drives used in G-Tech drives.

I have sold and used hundreds, maybe thousands of G-Tech drives for years. Yes some fail out of the box. That sucks. It’s why you should always do a hard drive test before putting into production.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

We test all our drives, RAM, SSDs, etc.. before putting them into service. That said, when it comes to HDDs/SSDs, they’re just like any other complex system in that a test only shows that it was functional at the time of the test and does not guarantee that it will work the next time.

I’ve found over the years that every drive maker has had their lemons or problematic models or series of drives. HGST has been the best for us with WD being second best. The others — Toshiba, Fuji, Seagate, Samsung... Are usually all somewhat comparable and I try to avoid where I can. Seagates seem to be either really bad or really good with not much middle ground and it varies by each model or series. I wait for the reviews and see what people think 6 months into use before jumping on a new Seagate drive series.

I have had a lot of issues with external units from various makers and it’s often not the drives themselves that fail, but the enclosures or interfaces within.

 

[David Callahan]

Have any of you ever used Glyph drives? They are marketing to professionals with a great warranty and advanced replacement on most drives. Also it looks as if they do data recovery as part of their warranty. I’ve used them on a couple dit jobs and they are built like tanks.
https://www.glyphtech.com/warranty.html

 

[Ketch Rossi]

I needed to choose from 5 different Storage companies to take care of my HD & SSD data needs, and at the end despite G-Tech offered the list amount of $$$$ to Product, I choose them as my Sponsor because in the past decade I never had a single G-Tech drive fail me, while few of the others I used did.

As for the possibility of failure with G-Tech, well, there is always that chance as with every other manufacturer, yet I can honestly back them up to be great.

As for the critical data large Data Center type of storage, there are companies that have far better everything than G-Tech, but then again, G-Tech is not really meant for that type of gargantuan instals.

But again, for daily & mid term storage within and up to few hundred Terabytes G-Tech is really the best. Once you go to Petabytes * Exabytes than is when I would honestly choose some one else top build me a Data Center.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

@David — I have had some recent issues with Glyph. Not going to air out my laundry here, but I won’t be buying from them again.

 

[DJ Meyer]

Speaking of G-Tech, what do we have to do to get a TB3 version of the EV Dock? Still slumming it with TB1 !