All user reviews for the Glyph Technologies Portagig

This is the second Glyph external hard drive I've purchased, and they're awesome - never a problem, they just function as they should. I use both hard drives for Pro Tools, and I've used them with M-Powered on Windows format and now with HD on Mac format. Never a glitch recording straight to these hard drives or pulling samples for memory hogs like BFD2 from them.



It's rather unrealistic to expect any drive to be TOTALLY silent... although I must say my Glyph drive is, in my opinion, astonishingly quiet. A few simple precautions keep any fan noise out of my recordings, which are made in the same room as the computer and two external fan-cooled drives. The drives both reside on shelves under my desk, with just a little acoustic foam on the surfaces close to them, as well as some other sound-absorbent office supplies like stacks of paper nearby (taking care not to block the vents on the drives, of course). I've been very satisfied with the Glyph drive, which set up perfectly the first time and has always behaved as one would hope.

My iTunes collection also resides on it, and despite the immense number of files, access has been much, much faster with the Glyph drive than with my consumer-level LaCie Quadra 2. I was also very excited that the variety of connection options on the Glyph helped me cope with the dearth of Firewire ports on my Mac; right now I'm running my MOTU traveler into the Glyph's FW400 port, then the Glyph's FW800 port to the Mac... works incredibly well. I'm currently planning to buy two more Glyph drives for video and archiving. Anyhoo, I don't claim to be an expert on peripherals by any means, but I must say I've been completely satisfied with my Glyph drive and feel it was an excellent purchase, and one I would heartily recommend to anyone.

This is a portable hard drive that is made by Glyph Technologies. Their drives are among the better ones I've used in my career and that's saying something just because drives crash all the time. The Glyph company guarantees their drives too, which is saying more than most. The one that I use is half a terabyte, or 500 GB. Basically it has a lot of space, more than most people would need for a long time. I like the fact that this drive has both USB and firewire connections, but what's more is that with the newest drives, there is also a eSATA connection for data transfer. The drive can be bus-powered with the firewire 800 channel, or it can just be powered with an external power supply that comes with it. The eSATA channel needs power from either the fire wire or the external power supply.
This is a high performance drive in every sense of the word. It's very fast and it works great. I've never had a problem with it jittering or taking too long to load a session. It's also never crashed on me, making it one of the few besides my LaCie drive to do that. This is a big deal, as a drive that never crashes is a godsend to a working recording engineer, or even somebody who just has a lot of stuff on their drives.
Basically, this is invaluable and at such a good price nowadays (who knew drives would get so cheap after they were so expensive for so long?) there's no excuse for not having a good drive. Other than, of course, not having any drives at all. This is worth checking out, because even if it does break its guaranteed to be fixed for free by the warranty. A good purchase all around.

The Glyph Technologies Portagig is an external hard drive that comes in a number of different sizes, ranging from 160 GB to 500 GB. The one that I've used was the 500 GB model. I've used it in a professional recording studio both as a back up drive and to transfer sessions from place to place on. Let me start off by saying that I've never ever had a problem with the drive. It has never acted funny or not done exactly what I wanted it to do. This is really saying a lot, as most hard drives out there tend to have some serious problems. Glyph Technologies is undoubtedly at the top of their game when it comes to making hard drives, as I've never met a person with a Glyph drive who wasn't completely satisfied. The best part about owning a Glyph drive is that in the off chance that you do have a problem with one of their drives, they will stand behind it every step of the way with customer support, replacement, and restoring your information if you can't get to it. I don't know of any other hard drive manufactures out there who stand behind their products like Glyph does. So even though you're going to be paying a bit more for any of the Glyph drives, if you're concerned with your hard drives always working properly, getting a Glyph drive like the Portagig will ease these worries. We used the Portagig as our most dependable drive, and even though we of course stored plenty of back ups, I always feel very secure when using the Portagig. Just by holding it and looking at it you can tell that this is no ordinary hard drive. This is thing is built at an extremely high quality and is built to last. If you're constantly working off of a hard drive, you want the piece of mind that you're secure, and beyond backing up your work which you should be doing no matter what, the best way to do this is by getting a Glyph drive like the Portagig.