The fan is temperature sensitive, so under heavy sustained load(eg DiskTester fill-volume), the noise level does increase as needed to maintain the drives at optimum temperature, which is what you want for reliability. In fact, the drives themselves make more noise than the fan when idle. But that’s pretty much what most drives do these days. I’d like to be able to easily disable the glowing LEDs behind the front grill- at night if the GMAX is not turned off, these lights are quite bright. The status and display lights are well done and informative. The five pin connector is very common, but it is not my favorite because it is not mechanically sound over time if one plugs/unplugs frequently. The power supply is external, with a five-pin connector. The heavy-duty rubber feet minimize vibration, and the drives are mounted with shock-absorbing grommets. The black all-aluminum case is not only solid, but attractive. It’s about as compact as you can expect for such a device, measuring about 9.5 deep X 2.75 inches wide, and stands 5.5 inches high.īuild quality is excellent. The GMAX is a solidly built yet compact unit, especially considering that it encloses two full size hard drives. A good choice there is the Mercury Elite AL-Pro. Most users do not have nearly that much data, so the GMAX is a more cost effective solution.įor backups to be stored away from the computer, my preference is multiple external drives- after all, dropping the unit or a failure of the power supply are risks that affect the whole enclosure, and thus two separate drives makes more sense for off-site backups. I considered the GMAX for attached storage for archiving purposes, but my data already approaches 1.6TB, so I went with the OWC QX2 with RAID-5 instead, because it offers 6GB of capacity, while still allowing a drive to fail. But please note that a severe voltage surge, theft, fire, flood or electronics-eating dinosaurs can negate any device, mirror or not, so keep off-site backups as well. The GMAX is a great choice for storage you access on a daily basis, because it lowers the odds of data loss. In general, anyone looking to expand storage externally will find a lot to like with the GMAX. With a 2-drive RAID-1 mirror, either drive can fail with no data loss, with no loss of functionality (failed drive should be replaced). That’s 4TB of storage, but as a RAID-1 mirror there is 2TB of usable capacity, because a mirror is a redundant copy. The test unit included two Hitachi 7K2000 2TB hard drives. Internally, it runs as a RAID-1 mirror, but those are details the Mac doesn’t see- it’s plug and play just as with any single drive. The Newer Technology Guardian MAXimus (“GMAX”) is a enclosure containing two drives which appears to the Mac as a single external drive. Send Feedback Related: backup, eSATA, hard drive, laptop, Mac Pro, MacBook, MacBook Pro, noise, RAID, RAID-1, storage, USB
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