SANDISK G-RAID MIRROR: FAST, SAFE HARD DRIVE STORAGE AND LOTS OF IT

TWD's G-RAID Mirror is an external enclosure housing two 3.5-inch hard drives. It provides up to 48TB of storage with the drives in striped (RAID 0) mode, or half that in mirror mode RAID 1. It also provides a Pro Blade SSD port (fave.co/3VGOZYC) for SanDisk's modular NVMe SSDs.

- JON JACOBI

What you may not realize if you haven't been around a 3.5-inch HDD in a while: They're a whole lot faster than they used to be. In RAID 0, the G-RAID Mirror can deliver data at over 400MBps. This is not your father's RAID box.

G-RAID MIRROR FEATURES

The G-RAID Mirror is a handsome, dark gray, Thunderbolt 3, two-drive external enclosure available in capacities up to 48TB/24TB (striped/mirrored). The unit measures 5.24x8.27x4.06 inches (13.30×21.00×0.21 centimeters). It can weigh up to 7 pounds (3.17 kilograms) depending on the drives inside. As it's standing on nonskid feet, there's little chance of this drive dancing around the desktop. The four hex bolts on each side hide anchor points for attaching the unit to a Digital Imaging Technician cart or adding other hardware.

The back of the G-RAID Mirror is home to two Thunderbolt 3 ports (one computer, one pass-through, see below), as well as the RAID configuration double dip switch (JBOD, RAID 0/1). That means the RAID is onboard, which I prefer over the software variety as it's portable across operating systems without installing said software. There's also a button to adjust the front LED light.

The front of the drive is home to only the aforementioned LED light, and the removable front grate that allows access to the hard drives for upgrade or replacement. Note that because of the fantastic amount of capacity, rebuilding a RAID 1 array can take a very long time-two hours per terabyte.