There’s some fierce competition between hard drive manufacturers, and Hitachi isn’t going to let Seagate enjoy the 4TB spotlight for even a full week. The company’s G-Technology division has introduced their own 4TB disk and is packing two of them inside a whopping 8TB G-RAID external case complete with Thunderbolt.

G-Technology by Hitachi can’t stake claim to the world’s first 4TB hard drive -- Seagate just did that this week -- but they can lay claim to being the first to stick two such drives inside a slick G-RAID casing and stick a Thunderbolt I/O port on the outside. The company’s new 4TB-based G-RAID and single-drive G-DRIVE solutions will ship with Thunderbolt in the fourth quarter, but lovers of legacy I/O ports including eSATA, FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 can get their mitts on one in October.

“We understand the process of creation, and today, digital video editing is no longer facility-driven -- It’s driven by the places and lifestyles of the people doing the work,” said Steve Pereira, vice president, Hitachi GST, who is demonstrating the new line at the IBC 2011 show in Amsterdam this week. “Our G-RAID Thunderbolt demo connected to a MacBook Pro shows how our customers can get lightning speed and huge capacity in a single RAID 0 storage solution to easily edit anywhere.

“Built like a tank, our G-RAID solution has been the cornerstone of our business, and we look forward to bringing our Thunderbolt-based family and 4TB-based solutions to the market,” Pereira continues. “With G-Technology’s high quality, high performance commitment, our customers can continue to focus on their work and not on their equipment.”

G-RAID with Thunderbolt is billed as the highest capacity two-drive RAID 0 external storage device in the world, ready to use right out of the box with Mac OS X systems where it appears as a single, big and fast hard drive. (G-RAID also supports Windows systems with a simple reformat.)

The company hasn’t announced any firm pricing for the new G-RAID with Thunderbolt, but interested consumers of big storage can stay tuned to the company’s website for more details in the near future.

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