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| Industry | External hard disk drive, backup and content management services |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2004 |
| Headquarters | , |
| Parent | Western Digital |
| Website | Official Website |
SanDisk Professional (previously G-Technology) is a brand of Western Digital that produces external storage products designed and marketed for the Macintosh, creative pro, photography and A/V markets. [1] Its USB, FireWire, eSATA, SAS, SCSI Thunderbolt, and Fibre Channel systems support all levels of audio/video production. [2]
In 2004, Medea Corporation, a manufacturer of storage systems optimized for digital content creation, was sold to Avid Technology. [3] Medea co-founder Roger Mabon purchased the rights to one of Medea’s products from Avid – a two-drive RAID 0 storage system for creative professionals – and opened up his own startup company just blocks from his house in Santa Monica. [3]
The company sold products to a local community of audio/video creative professionals until the company made an agreement in 2006 with Apple that greatly increased placement of their products in Apple stores in the United States, and raised their revenue from $20,000 a month in 2004 to millions. [3]
In January 2008, Fabrik Inc. bought G-Technology for an undisclosed amount. [4] [5] [6] That month, the company introduced the world’s first 500 GB 2.5” portable storage drive [7] [8] [9] and the first 1 TB portable external storage drive at Macworld Expo. [10] [11] G-Technology announced the first family of external solid-state drives (SSD) at Macworld Expo 09. [12] [13] [14]
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) bought Fabrik and its G-Technology brand in 2009. [15] HGST in turn was bought by Western Digital in 2012. [16] G-Technology is currently a line of products sold by Western Digital.
Starting from 2021, G-Technology is rebranded by Western Digital into SanDisk Professional, while keeping G-Technology Heritage. [17] [18] [19]
SanDisk Professional sells their external storage devices for professionals under the product lines G-SPEED, G-RAID, G-SAFE, and G-DRIVE.
G-RAID is a line of portable external hard drive products used for field editing and backup for video producers and camera operators. The line supports RAID 0 (striped volume) and are encased in aircraft-grade aluminum for ruggedness.
G-RAID drives support multi-stream DV, HDV, DVCPro HD, XDCAM HD, ProRes 422 and uncompressed SD workflows and can be connected via FireWire 400, FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 ports.
The line also includes the G-RAID mini, a smaller version with no power cord, that’s powered by a FireWire plug into a computer or laptop. This smaller G-RAID mini comes in capacities up to 1TB in a RAID 0 or RAID 1 (mirroring).
G-SPEED is designed for professional content creation applications used to edit and produce digital video and film productions.
The G-SPEED line includes desktop and server rack-mount products ranging up to 16TBs using 16 hot-swappable drives. The G-SPEED line has high-end performance specifications geared toward content producers, Fibre Channel products, 4GBit connectivity, and more.
It also includes the G-SPEED eS, which is a small desktop enclosure with four drives.
G-SAFE is optimized for professional digital photographers. It comes with RAID 1 functionality to protect digital photography.
G-SAFE products support both FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 connections.
G-DRIVE consists of single-drive external storage units that work with both Mac and Windows PCs to offer up to 10 TB capacities. G-DRIVE features support for FireWire 800, FireWire 400 and USB 2.0 connections. [20] (2020 Update. Also Thunderbolt 3, USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 Gen. 1 connections. [21] )
The series also includes the G-DRIVE mini, a smaller version, and the G-DRIVE Q, which has more support options for FireWire 400, FireWire 800, USB 2.0 and eSATA ports in a single unit.
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnetic material. The platters are paired with magnetic heads, usually arranged on a moving actuator arm, which read and write data to the platter surfaces. Data is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored and retrieved in any order. HDDs are a type of non-volatile storage, retaining stored data when powered off. Modern HDDs are typically in the form of a small rectangular box.
Serial ATA is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. Serial ATA succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA (PATA) standard to become the predominant interface for storage devices.
Western Digital Corporation is an American computer hard disk drive manufacturer and data storage company, headquartered in San Jose, California. It designs, manufactures and sells data technology products, including storage devices, data center systems and cloud storage services.
A USB flash drive is a data storage device that includes flash memory with an integrated USB interface. It is typically removable, rewritable and much smaller than an optical disc. Most weigh less than 30 g (1 oz). Since first appearing on the market in late 2000, as with virtually all other computer memory devices, storage capacities have risen while prices have dropped. As of March 2016, flash drives with anywhere from 8 to 256 gigabytes (GB) were frequently sold, while 512 GB and 1 terabyte (TB) units were less frequent. As of 2018, 2 TB flash drives were the largest available in terms of storage capacity. Some allow up to 100,000 write/erase cycles, depending on the exact type of memory chip used, and are thought to physically last between 10 and 100 years under normal circumstances.
Iomega produced external, portable, and networked data storage products. Established in the 1980s in Roy, Utah, United States, Iomega sold more than 410 million digital storage drives and disks, including the Zip drive floppy disk system. Formerly a public company, it was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2008, and then by Lenovo, which rebranded the product line as LenovoEMC, until discontinuation in 2018.
REV is a removable hard disk storage system from Iomega.
A disk enclosure is a specialized casing designed to hold and power disk drives while providing a mechanism to allow them to communicate to one or more separate computers.
The Microdrive is a registered trademark for miniature, 1-inch hard disks produced by IBM and Hitachi. These rotational media storage devices were designed to fit in CompactFlash (CF) Type II slots. The release of similar drives by other makers led to them often being referred to as "microdrives" too. By 2010, Microdrives were viewed as obsolete, having been overtaken by solid-state flash media in read/write performance, storage capacity, durability, and price.
Transcend Information, Inc. is a Taiwanese company headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan that manufactures and distributes memory products. Transcend deals in over 2,000 products including memory modules, flash memory cards, USB flash drives, portable hard drives, multimedia products, solid-state drives, dashcams, body cameras, personal cloud storage, card readers and accessories.
HGST, Inc. was a manufacturer of hard disk drives, solid-state drives, and external storage products and services.
Kingston Technology Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, sells and supports flash memory products, other computer-related memory products, as well as the HyperX gaming division. Headquartered in Fountain Valley, California, United States, Kingston Technology employs more than 3,000 employees worldwide as of Q1 2016. The company has manufacturing and logistics facilities in the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Taiwan, and China.
My Book is a series of external hard drives produced by Western Digital. There are currently nine series of My Book drives; Essential Edition, Home Edition, Office Edition, Mirror Edition, Studio Edition, Premium Edition, Elite Edition, Pro Edition, AV Dvr "Live Edition", and the World Edition.
A solid-state drive (SSD) is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies to store data persistently, typically using flash memory, and functioning as secondary storage in the hierarchy of computer storage. It is also sometimes called a semiconductor storage device, a solid-state device or a solid-state disk, even though SSDs lack the physical spinning disks and movable read–write heads used in hard disk drives (HDDs) and floppy disks.
Promise Technology is an American-Taiwanese supplier of RAID storage catering to customers from the enterprise to SMB, as well as SOHO and digital home applications.
sTec is an American computer data storage technology company headquartered in California, with research and development, sales, support or manufacturing sites in China, India, Japan, Malaysia, Silicon Valley (USA), and Taiwan.
Drobo is a manufacturer of a series of external storage devices for computers, including DAS, SAN, and NAS appliances. Drobo devices can house up to four, five, eight, or twelve 3.5" or 2.5" Serial ATA or Serial Attached SCSI hard disk drives and connect with a computer or network via USB 2.0, USB 3.0, FireWire 800, eSATA, Gigabit Ethernet or Thunderbolt. Drobo devices are primarily designed to allow installation and removal of hard disk drives without requiring manual data migration, for increasing storage capacity of the unit without downtime, and for data protection against drive failure.
JMicron Technology Corporation is a Taiwanese fabless technology design house based in Hsinchu, Taiwan. As a manufacturer of integrated circuits, they produce controller chips for bridge devices.
Fabrik Inc. was a manufacturer of external hard drives and digital content management software and services. Fabrik claims it was the third largest supplier of external storage products in North America in 2007. It is headquartered in San Mateo, with offices in Santa Ana and Culver City, California.
Dmailer was a French company which specialized in portable backup and synchronization software for devices, including USB flash drives, memory cards, external hard disk drives, MP3 players, embedded phone memories, SIM cards and flash-based memory cards for mobile phones.
Other World Computing (OWC) is an American computer hardware company and online store for Mac upgrades and accessories. MacSales.com was founded in 1988. It also goes by the domain name www.owcdigital.com
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