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G-Technology’s origin story reads like a Silicon Valley startup playbook. In 1994, Roger Mabon co-founded a little storage solutions company called Medea while pursuing his MBA degree at the University of Southern California.

Medea did well enough to get acquired by Avid a decade later, and Mabon bought the rights to one of his products: a dual-drive RAID enclosure for creative pros. He built his new company, G-Technology, on the foundation of that little box. Two years later, Mabon reached an agreement with Apple to place G-Technology’s Mac-friendly products in its popular stores. It even looked like a perfect fit, as G-DRIVES were designed to reflect the stainless-steel design of the Power Mac G5. G-Technology took off like a rocket.

One decade and a few corporate acquisitions later, G-Technology is now a brand under the globe-spanning Western Digital umbrella. However, that original emphasis on delivering the performance, reliability, and features creative pros crave remains. G-Technology senior product marketing manager Matthew Bennion spoke with the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) about the challenges confronting today’s creative content producers and where G-Technology sees storage solutions heading.

MESA: Should we begin by talking about what’s next for storage?

Bennion: Sure thing. And maybe it’s telling that we don’t talk as much about ‘storage’ now as we do ‘data management.’ Because that’s really what you need to do, right? You can put files on a drive, but that can be like dropping pebbles down a well. Where’s that drive two years later? Do you know what’s on it? Is that drive still reliable?

I work with dozens of creative pros every week, and nearly every one of them has a story about how they experienced drive failure and data loss in their early days, back when they used the cheapest storage they could find. It’s similar on the performance side. If you plug in the cheapest drive you can find, you’re going to have super long transfer times when you’re dealing with professional level shooting. RAW photography alone will run into tens of gigabytes.

Shooting 8K or VR video can push you into the terabytes. You just can’t work with slow storage when you’re on the clock and handling that kind of content. You have to manage that data and work it into a more feasible schedule.

MESA: There’s that much difference between drives?

Bennion: Absolutely. I had a photographer tell me recently that a typical day of shooting for him used to transfer in two hours.

That’s two hours he’s sitting around waiting, potentially paying his crew overtime wages. With our latest G-DRIVE mobile Pro SSD, he made that transfer in seven minutes.

MESA: Is that just from moving to SSD from hard drives?

Bennion: Not quite. Hard drives remain important, because it’s going to be a long time before solid state displaces hard drives on a cost-per-gigabyte basis. And yes, SSD media is much faster than hard disk. But there’s fast SSD memory, and then really fast SSD memory. There’s the quality of the drive controller.

There’s the speed of the interface. That drive I mentioned uses Thunderbolt 3, which is eight times faster than USB 3.0. I don’t want to get too far into the weeds, but there’s also the storage protocol —wicked fast NVMe versus the slower SATA protocol used on most mobile drives. We even spent months custom designing how that drive displaces heat so it wouldn’t burn up or be hot to the touch at those speeds.

MESA: Where does RAID technology fit in with today’s creatives?

Bennion: RAID is more important than ever, but a lot of people — even long-time creative veterans — don’t fully understand what it is or how to use it. In a nutshell, RAID is a way of handling data during reads and writes that gives you three things: more speed, more data protection, or a combination of the two. The more drives you have, the more you can potentially do with these benefits in terms of which RAID “level” you can select.

When you have hardware-based RAID, like what we implement in our G-RAID and G-SPEED enclosures, you get the best mix of performance and protection, and often you can reconfigure the product to use whichever RAID level you need at the time. For example, if you’re a creative who needs maximum performance today but wants to use that solution with a higher priority on long-term data protection later, you can make that switch.

MESA: With a camera phone in every pocket and even little kids growing up as YouTubers, how does G-Technology intend to position itself within the changing storage landscape?

Bennion: I saw a statistic recently that said 1.3 trillion images were created worldwide annually. Annually! People are conditioned to consume media with this non-stop flick-flick-flick of their thumb. I’m not saying that’s wrong or bad, but it does make it increasingly hard for creatives to stand out.

And to do that – to stand out and be a go-to professional able to attract an audience and retain clients – you can’t just be good. Cameras do that for you now. Everyone is good. You need to provide a higher caliber of deliverables. Maybe that means you shoot 8K when your competition is shooting 4K. Maybe you’re hired for a two-minute commercial, but you toss in a gallery of stills and even a VR clip, just to stand apart.

And most of all, you can deliver these incredible assets in less time. You can provide daily snippets for your client’s social media feeds and still get six hours of sleep out on location. That’s the value of having data management with best-in-class performance.

And reliability? Man, what do you think happens if you get home and discover you have a dead drive? All those weeks, all those thousands of dollars wrapped up in captured assets, gone. Forever. That’s why professionals will keep on buying our products as we adapt for changing market conditions.

It’s not just that we’ll be here. Their data will still be here, too, we know their professional lives depend on it.