The unit featuring two (2) Thunderbolt 2 connectors mounts to a Mac right out of the box. To me, the T4’s reduced size is important, as I must often transport the drive on airplanes to meet with producers in a distant city or set up a workstation in my hotel room. The beautifully machined, all-aluminum unit is rugged as hell, and considerably more compact than other four-drive RAID systems. The T4 can accept both conventional 3.5-inch HDDs for economy and 2.5-inch SSDs for maximum performance and reliability. Working regularly on a range of fiction and non-fiction projects, the CalDigit T4 is my go-to solution, offering supreme reliability and performance-particularly when fitted with SSDs. Needless to say, for the pro shooter and filmmaker, reliable gear-especially one’s primary media drive-is not only imperative to the exercise of one’s good craft, but it also means staying employed! I don’t want to add my own personal crashes of critical hardware to contribute to the chaos. The business of shooting motor sports is hard enough, particularly around a NASCAR track. More recently, at NASCAR in 2013, I experienced the failure of two separate FireWire controller boards in different RAID systems.
The flimsy FireWire connector on my portable drive went intermittent and finally stopped working completely.
The latter failure happened to me in 2007, while shooting a movie in a remote corner of Rajasthan India. In most cases, from a strictly technical perspective, it was not the hard drive that failed but a cheaply manufactured controller board or interface connector. Like most media professionals, I’ve experienced my fair share of hard drive failures.
The CalDigit T4 is a true professional storage RAID offering content creators and filmmakers very high performance in a rugged and extremely reliable package. Like most of us these days, shooting increasingly at resolutions higher than HD, I am concerned about proper management of the much larger media files, and therefore I demand the most reliable and rugged HDD or SSD RAID I can find. In the current era of tapeless and diskless workflows, my principal storage volume is at the core of everything I do, so naturally I demand an appropriate level of security in terms of redundancy as well as the high performance required for seamless editing of multiple video streams at 2K and 4K resolutions. This is especially true while I'm working overseas or in remote locations, where the critical task may take place under less-than-ideal conditions. I am not normally a fearful person, but I must admit I am a tad nervous when it comes to offloading and storing my original camera files.