Western Digital My Book Thunderbolt Duo 6TB 3.5" Thunderbolt Dual-drive Storage System Western Digital My Book Thunderbolt Duo 6TB 3.5" Thunderbolt Dual-drive Storage System Western Digital My Book Thunderbolt Duo 4TB 3.5" Thunderbolt Dual-drive Storage System

Pros: -The RAID option is awesome. 2TB redundant (Raid 1) or 4TB Speedy (Raid 0) or just 2 disks, etc.
-The hard drives are easy to open and swap out if needs be. How unlike Mac -eh? But this is WD and none of that Mac stuff here. This is a HUGE plus for the enclosure. Really high end. I likes it.

The hard drive comes with formatted for OSX, you can format it for PC as well, but without some other major formatting for advanced users, it’s best to leave it @ mac. The software is easy enough, but I just use OSX innate software for formatting it RAID 1 or RAID 0. It’s easy enough.

I’m not much of a fan of synthetic benchmarks with fake data files, so all is real world data to (read) and from (write) my SSD (few bottlenecks) with stopwatch. Latest version of 10.8 was used. May be be millisecond ultra accurate, but it’s real world accurate. You’re not going to be running operating systems, running complex apps, or worried about latency or IOPS. You’re going to be doing 2 things: reading and writing. That’s it. So here are real world speeds for a few gigs of tiny (html, .css, .txt), medium (JPG photos from digital camera or MP3s) and large files (e.g. HD movie). I think I could get faster results to and from a RAMdrive, but lets just use the fastest SSD Macbooks come with so far.

In RAID 1 (Redundant - 2TB)
1. Large file (1 @ 5.80 GB)
Write: 109.4MB/sec
Read: 109.4MB/sec

2. Average files (2,356 @ 2.95GB)
Write: 98.3 MB/sec
Read: 105.3 MB/sec

3. Tiny files (12,710 @ 190MB)
Write: 17.3 MB/sec
Read: 19.0 MB/sec

In RAID 0 (Speed - 4TB total)
1. Large file (1 @ 5.80 GB)
Write: 165.7 MB/sec
Read: 223.0 MB/sec (WOW!)

This is indeed the fastest external I have ever seen, especially on WD Green HDDs.

Cons: No USB or Mac’s beloved Firewire? You drop how-ever-much this costs and they can’t add USB or Firewire port? Unacceptable. Also it’s quite bulky, but that’s understandable. Also, no on/off switch. 2/3rds of the price of this external HDD is this fancy enclosure, it should have ALL the bells, whistles and connectivity. At time of this writing you are paying $200 more for this Thunderbird over USB/1394, why not include their connectivity?

I would have really liked to see what the USB 3.0 speeds were. I bet there are the exact same as the Thunderbolt speeds, but if that got out, they couldn't charge the huge premium of thunderbolt. Since both still need external power, I’m not seeing the advantage of Thunderbolt here. If it were an SSD, then the 400MB/sec speeds that thunderbolt can real world output could be pretty cool.

Physically, the plastic cover feels a bit cheap, but looks okay. Not Mac sessy, but it’s okay. It’s very light and feels cheaper though.

You can’t use other hard drives in this, so you’re stick with WD green, FYI.

Other Thoughts: Though certainly bleeding edge, this is certainly cool, and almost counts as a backup (automatic, redundant, *-off site*). Fastest speeds on all counts. Three year warranty: better than minimum (vs 1 yr), but don’t get me started on the fake hard drive shortage, the wink and the nod between this new duopoly of Seagate and WD colluding to keep prices high and warranties short. This drive should be half price at time of this writing. <Sigh> Topic for another day and a topic for the US Department of Justice for price fixing one day soon, mark my words. Anyways, hope this helps you decide if this HDD will work for you.

Cheers and thanks to Newegg - you rock.

Manufacturer Response:

We appreciate your feedback and apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced with the My Book Thunderbolt Duo, as this is not the typical experience with the product. We have forwarded your suggestions to our product development team for further review and consideration. Please be advised that we do have an External Dual Drive that comes with Firewire connectors. Please take a look at our My Book Studio II line. You can see it on the link bellow:
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/external/desktopformac/
There is also a Thunderbolt DUO that contains our 10,000 RPM drives; The Velociraptors, which allow for even faster file transfers. You can read more here.
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=860
If necessary, we would appreciate the opportunity to further assist you, and resolve any further concerns you may have with the device and/or your experience. You may contact us at 1 (800) 275-4932, or via our support website at: http://support.wdc.com/rs/. Please indicate within the online case creation or with the first support agent you speak with, that you are responding to a Newegg review, so we route you and your information to the correct team members.

Pros: It’s pretty good in size. Much bigger and heavier than I expected.

Surprisingly generates very little heat dissipation.

The drive is relatively easy on the pocket book and the eyes. It supports 3 RAID configurations (See other thoughts). Also it is preconfigured in RAID 0 and preformatted.

It is easy to service by simply pushing on the top of the case revealing the 2x 2TB drives inside.

Installation was a breeze straight out of the box; plug in and go.

You’ll need a Thunderbolt-enabled Mac running OS X 10.68 or later or a PC motherboard with a Thunderbolt port to use this device (See other thoughts).

It has dual Thunderbolt ports for daisy chaining (up to 6 things connected in a row on one Thunderbolt port).

The color scheme very much goes along with the MacBook Pro. (Western Digital pulled it off once again for the Mac users utilizing a beautiful color scheme.

Cons: The Western Digital “My Book Thunderbolt Duo” 4TB is a little slower than other Thunderbolt storage devices on the market. Assumably why it is a lot more affordable compared to other available Thunderbolt devices out there.

I understand this drive is marketed toward Mac users, thus the drive offers no other connection types like USB or Firewire. Also the drive does not include a Thunderbolt cable. That’s an additional $50 investment in itself.

When people order something online, they really want to use it right away and not have to wait for that cable to arrive later on. So as a side note, you may want to dedicate yourself to a cable first before purchasing this drive to get your full 30 day return policy if there were ever any defects in the product. Defects will usually show their ugly heads within 30 days if there are any to be had, thus your Newegg 30 day return policy.

Other Thoughts: I tested the drive on a 2011 MacBook Pro running OS X v10.7 (a.k.a. Lion) with a 256GB SSD, 6 Gb/s HDD.

The WD Thunderbolt Duo 4TB drive is very MUCH for those whom deal with large files like HD video editing. Or for those whom need a large space to store or backup large amounts of data.

The drive is configured when shipped in RAID 0 (4TB) both drives as a single unit (an array). Though it’s faster in the stripped array than a mirrored array (2 drives with identical data on each for reliability), the included software will allow you to set up a mirrored array, slowing drive speeds, but giving you a dual copy of more securely stored data in RAID 1 @ a 2TB capacity. The third option is to use each drive independently again for a total of 4TB of storage space. There are 3 options; RAID 0 (default), RAID 1, and two separate volumes, RAID 0 (strip). In other words; performance, resiliency, or capacity. You can learn more about RAID by hitting up just about any Wiki site.

SPEED TESTS:
In default mode my read & write speeds of 160GB of data ranged from 175Mb/s all the way up to 210Mb/s with various file sizes ranging from 2MB to 8GB. And in mirrored mode speeds went lower as expected; 116Mb/s to 168Mb/s (again with random mass data). By the way this was data to and from the MacBook Pro. Pretty good considering these are “green” drives. The read and writes to itself were obviously slower than what I have mentioned.

10 Gb/s is claimed for speed on this drive, but I don’t understand how this claim can be made considering the fastest internal drives available are 6Gb/s (SATA 3) and on top of that these are low power consumption 5400 rpm “green” drives.

The 2 internal 2TB HDD’s used are from Western Digital’s Green drive selection. They’re green to save power but in exchange you get a little bit of a slower performance (technically – but this drive PERFORMS!). You could hop it up I guess with some 7200 RPM drives – but at this price, and the performance speeds it offers, I don’t see a reason why.

If you’re a PC user you will not be able to use this device unless you have a motherboard with a Thunderbolt port (which you can also find right here at Newegg.

And still considering what Thunderbolt prices are and what they offer (well for the most part) I personally think PC users will find USB 3.0 and Firewire to their liking considering the price point for those products. However as the technology becomes more “accepted” to the PC market, there could be an increase in demand for Thunderbolt ports on PC’s again considering the power and flexibility of a Thunderbolt port.

Pros: Silent round, it doesn't hear and produces not too much heat. Configure in RAID 1, it is still fast and can write and read at the same time without loss of speed for backup! I now have a backup of my digital archives as safe that I have ever had and I have access to the files as if they were in my internal drive, wow!

Cons: Thunderbolt Cable not included!