By: Charlie Burket, Techkit Specialist

The first rule of any production is to have a solid media handling strategy. Because original camera and audio files will be generated in production—and need to be further manipulated in post production—all of that media will need to be accessible, stored, and backed up. The 4TB G-Drive is a great solution to help address these workflow needs. Let’s look at a few ways to get started using the G-Drive in your techkit.

Understanding the G-Drive
The specifications of any hard drive are important so that you are able to determine the best use for it in your production workflow. There are a variety of hard drives out there on the market today—from M.2, NVMe and SATA Solid State Drives (SSD) to 7200 and 5400rpm traditional drives. Each type of drive offers advantages and opportunities over others. SSDs are great for extremely quick access and write times but are very expensive compared to traditional spinning platter drives.

The G-Drive is a traditional 5400rpm spinning external hard drive. For those of you who may not know, a spinning drive has a physically rotating group of platters and “needle” that writes and reads information on the platter. The platters rotate at 5400rpm which is why you may feel the drive vibrate a little when its powered on. The G-Drive offers a good blend of performance and storage in a small box. It does not require a seperate power adapter and draws energy from the USB bus when connected to the computer. This is what is known as “Bus powered”. The transfer speed is around 135MB/s which is good for copying media cards and backing up your projects. As I mentioned before, it’s a 4TB capacity drive which is four times larger than the internal hard drive in your techkit computer.

Connecting and Handling the G-Drive
Connecting the G-Drive is pretty straightforward. The drive has one USB C port and comes with a USB C cable to connect it to your computer. There is also an included adapter which can change the end of the cable from USB C to USB A in case you need to connect the drive to a full size USB port on another computer. After you connect your G-Drive to the computer, place your hand on the top of the drive to feel it “spin up”. This is a hallmark of traditional spinning platter hard drives.

One very important note when using the G-Drive: Once it is plugged into the computer, do not pick it up or move the drive. This is to prevent the spinning platters and delicate needle from damaging outside forces. Handling the drive when it’s in operation is one of the biggest reasons why drives can malfunction. This type of handling caution is only necessary when the drive is powered on. A drive that has been disconnected and unpowered can be moved and handled without reservation—just avoid dropping it, of course!

Formatting the G-Drive
If this is the first time you are using the G-Drive with your MacBook Pro computer, after it has been connected, you’ll get a pop up message that asks if you want to set the drive as a Time Machine backup disk. Time machine is Apple’s automatic backup program and works great to make backing up of your entire computer very easy. Since we really want to keep the G-Drive as a media backup solution, we do not want to enable Time Machine to use it as a system backup.

Now, let’s look at formatting the drive so that it is optimized for Mac systems.

Note: If you already have files on your G-Drive prior to reading this article, you may want to skip formatting because it will completely wipe all of the information off the drive and prepare it as a new drive.

There is a program included with your operating system called Disk Utility. It can be found by clicking on the spotlight icon on the top right side of your FINDER toolbar and typing in “Disk Utility”. After Disk Utility is opened, you’ll see all of your connected storage devices in the left hand column.

1. Select the G-Drive from the column on the left, and then on the top of the right column, select Erase.

2. From the pop up box, the NAME field lets you set a custom name for your G-Drive

3. Below the name field is FORMAT. New Macs benefit from the APFS format, so select it from your format options. No need to use APFS encrypted or case sensitive.

After the drive has been formatted for Mac, go back to the top of the right column and select First Aid. This will make sure you don't have any bad information sectors and repair them if you do. First Aid is great to run periodically on your G-Drive if any performance issues develop over the course of using your hard drive.

Using the G-Drive
The most significant files you’ll want to backup are original camera and audio recordings. You can keep them organized by creating individual folders for each media card. For example, a typical folder might look like this:

Date_Projectname_Camera_Card#
(081521_Project3_BMPCC4K_C01)

Keeping to a naming convention like the one above or another that you decide on—and sticking with it—will be an excellent way to catalogue and store your media for future use.

We will be covering workflow specifically in another article, so let’s stick to the basics here. As you can see, having a G-Drive will really allow you to keep important media in a place where you will be able to find it. Avoid cluttering your computer desktop and internal hard drive on your computer with media you can store on the G-Drive to keep your system running at its peak!