G-DRIVE ev RaW: portable and tough USB 3 drive

G-Drive ev RaW

G-Technology's new G-DRIVE ev RaW is a fast, tough, portable USB 3 drive

The idea of a portable USB hard drive has been remarkably consistent across the years. If you look back at products that were around a decade ago, they look the same superficially. The biggest differences will be capacity (today's drives will be ten or twenty times bigger) and speed (today's drives will be massively faster).

So how do you improve on such a well-established concept?

By making it tougher.

The G-DRIVE ev RaW is a capable, fast portable USB 3 drive with the added bonus of being extremely rugged. You can drop it from a hight of 1.2m and it will survive intact, and that's without its protective bright blue bumper. With the bumper in place, it's good for 1.5m drops. That's easily more than the hight of even the biggest desk.

We tested it with AJA's demanding DiskWhack benchmark and got a nicely consistent 132.6 MB/s write speed and 129.7 MB/s read speed. This was with a with a 16 GB file size - highly representative of a video file.

We think the G-DRIVE ev RaW is a good package. It's tough, fast and has a useful capacity. It comes with a 3 year warranty, so looks like an all-round good buy.

Our test setup was a current Macbook Pro Retina with OS X Yosemite.

Thanks to Jim Pierson for his help with this article