WD My Book Thunderbolt Duo 4TB External Dual Hard Drive Storage with RAID

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Price: $496.99 $494.00   

Product Feature

• Revolutionary Thunderbolt technology
• Two Thunderbolt ports for high-speed multi-tasking
• Dual-drive storage system with user-selectable RAID 0/1
• User serviceable

Product Description

My Book Thunderbolt Duo dual-drive storage system featuring revolutionary Thunderbolt technology, sets new standards for data transfer speeds and workflow flexibility in high-capacity storage.

WD My Book Thunderbolt Duo 4TB External Dual Hard Drive Storage with RAID Review

I tested the drive on a 2011 iMac and 2011 MacBook Air and performance was excellent. What I like the most about this drive is that it is currently the quietest Thunderbolt drive on the market today. The unit uses two Western Digital Green drives and this results in lower power consumption and the ability to cool without need of a noisy fan. I compared the unit to a 6TB Lacie 2Big Thunderbolt system and the difference in noise level was enormous. The Lacie unit uses a Fan and when resuming from sleep makes a fairly loud groaning sound. The WD drive by comparison is almost silent.

The quiet operation comes at a cost however . Speed of reading and writing data is significantly slower than the Lacie 2Big unit. The My Book Thunderbolt operating in RAID 0 read data at a rate of about 220 MB/sec while the Lacie 2Big provided about 310 Mb/sec performance. This can be accounted for by the Green drives used in the My Book being only 5900 RPM drives versus the noisier 7200 RPM drives in the Lacie. Now is the user ever going to be able to tell the difference? Probably not because in most cases one will be transferring data from a much slower internal hard drive that provides maybe 120-130 Mb/s. For almost any application I can think of the speed of the My Book will be adequate. This unit is just plain easier to live with than the noisy competition.

I observed only one problem with the drive and that is that it refused to sleep automatically when connected to a 2011 iMac. It would sleep if I commanded it however. I did some research and it seems that for Thunderbolt drives it is left entirely up to Apple to provide firmware and OS compatibility updates for the Mac used. Western Digital it seems does not provide firmware updates for its Thunderbolt drives. When connected to the MacBook Air the drive slept normally. I tested both 10.7.3 and 10.7.4. The Lacie 2Big drive sleeps normally on the same iMac.

One really bad thing about this and every other competing Thunderbolt product is that the user must purchase a 49 dollar cable to connect it with.

As a last note prior to connecting this or any Thunderbolt Drive to your Mac make sure that for your Office 2011 you have SP2 installed. Otherwise Office 2011 will want to be reactivated every time you connect or disconnect the drive from the computer.

Update: Further investigation of the sleep problem on the iMac revealed it was caused by the Wd Drive utility software. I had not installed it on the Air and thus sleep worked normally. I removed wddrivehelper from login items and sleep then worked normally.

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