Glyph Studio 4TB External Hard Drive Level 1

I use these drives exclusively in my recording studio and on all the projects I produce, engineer &/or mix. They are STURDY, dependable and work long and hard for years and years. The Glyph customer service is flawless; couldn't be better. I've only needed to return 2 or 3 drives out of literally hundreds over the years (I go way back with Glyph drives before their "Glyph Studio' model). I insist on THREE drives for EVERY project because, in this 'digital world' in which we are forced to live, "If it doesn't exist in THREE places, it DOESN'T exist"!

I love Glyph. I've had for seven years, and I'm about to retire them for some 2TB solid state drives. I'll keep these around though as they work fine and are fast for backups.

First off, this is an expensive hard drive. I would expect much higher quality/reliability at this price point. The drive worked well as a Time Machine backup, but only lasted a year. Glyph was responsive and honored the warranty by sending an advance replacement. However the replacement drive they sent also seems defective as I am only getting 30Mb/s transfer speeds, both with FW800 and USB3 connections. The previous drive was 4x faster.I've tried re-contacting Glyph numerous times over the past five days, but they've gone silent. The product and support seems hit or miss.

ThE packaging is top notch, the drives are very high quality, and if you should get a dead one… I did get one once… support was amazing. They did an advance replacement, at no charge, so I got the new drive without having to pay for it and then get a refund, or wait until the defective drive was received. Amazing, the way support should be.

Just to be clear, I bought this to use solely as an extended storage device for my DirecTV programs. Because both this device and my DirecTV genie have an EASA input, I am able to store my programs on this unit which allows me to maintain a larger database of recorded programs. The downside is that if either my DirecTV genie or this hard drive fails, my programs are lost. DirecTV designed their equipment so each genie will be proprietorial with the attached hard drive. So far I have had no problems.

first, this version of glyph drives is a big improvement over the previous generation. this 4tb drive runs very quietly. my other glyph 2tb drive has a constant buzz that i attribute to either fan or other moving. if it were the drive(s), they would have already failed. the enclosure is the same size as my 2tb drive. it seems reliable. i have 2+ tb already on it and working on a couple vids. seems reliable.so why the -1 star? when i first plugged it in, it would not mount. after 2 minutes of waiting for it to show up, i just unplugged the usb and plugged it back in. it showed up this time. also, when i was seeding the drive with data the first time, it failed about 20 minutes into the job (super duper gave me an error dialog that claimed the device was ejected or some such.)did it all again and this time performed the data transfer completely (14 hours of data transfer). it has not hiccoughed since. seems to work fine

I see others complaining of Yosemite incompatibilities and this perhaps is yet another.Arrived and started beautifully May 2015I partitioned it with ease on an old Mac MIni 2006 Backed that up with Time Machine 300GB in about 4 hoursMoved it to a newer Macbook ProStarted with Yosemite 10.10.2Time Machine detected the Mac Mini TM file and offered to make the Macbook TM backup separateFlawlessThenJune 2015 Apple updates to 10.10.3 the partition holding the Time Machine backups would not mount and didn't want to be erased.I was able to work around the latter by getting it to RE-Partition back to just one partition and after that it would mount and it would allow any level of secure erase.Erased and sent back for refund.Either Apple needs to cut out whatever nightmare its selling with Yosemite or Third Party vendors needs to be integrated more closely with Apple's top engineers so that they CAN make compatible devices.Three stars for being ultra easy to set upBeing QuietLooking GoodNegative for Failing in less than a monthAnd for having a Firewire cable that doesn't fit tightly enough. It didn't jump out like folks say the cable does on Wes Digital drives but it definitely will fall out with a touch or a breeze.

I purchased my first Glyph HD from a now defunct Apple dedicated store in Manhattan. Still have it working well after many years. This brand is relatively quiet, and just works. I have had several Western Electric and LaCie drives fail, but never (so far) these replacements. Excellent brand!

A "bullet-proof" design; heavy as a brick, and as quiet as a mouse. . .running smooth via FW 800; will connect via USB 3 when I have a port. Impressed.

The enclosure is metal. The power supply is internal. The drive inside is a 7200rpm Toshiba MG08. Many cables included. The whole thing oozes quality, but with the asking price you'd think it was plated in gold. If this was say 25% more than your standard 16TB external drive it would be a 5 star product all day long. I'm all for paying for quality, but the asking price for this is over the top. I got a very good deal to the point where it made sense.

Works fast and reliably, and is solidly built, however for small/home studio audio recording & mixing its not great due to it being the loudest external HD I've ever heard. It pumps out the same amount of noise that the old PC towers did, if not more.