Pros: 10 TB! Ten! A few years ago, I couldn’t have dreamed of having 10 terabytes sitting on my desk next to me. I am a freelance/professional photographer in my spare time and anyone who has done independent work for someone knows just how absolutely scary it can be to lose someone’s files. Having backups of your backups of your backups is the best way to ensure you’ll never run into that problem, and this is a great way to do so! The unit is pretty attractive, features a quick on/off button, and some nice little activity lights for each drive (that I currently have covered with black electrical tape! Blegh.)

In my 10+ years of purchasing computers and hardware from Newegg, I can say without a doubt that Western Digital is the only name I trust. Not that others aren’t reliable, but nothing is better than a Western Digital drive for reliability and performance. Granted, I’ve only had this setup for a few weeks now, but as with anything else by WD, I look forward to years of trouble free use. The drives themselves are 5 TB WD Black drives, each at 128 MB of cache. Again, you just can’t buy a drive with a better combination of raw speed and reliability.

The USB ports on the front allow you to plug in other devices, including another drive like this or a cell phone to charge. It has some daisy-chaining functionality; I have my wireless keyboard receiver plugged in and it is working. I’m not entirely sure how far that capability stretches, though.

Having the option of RAID configurations and JBOD is nice, though I suspect RAID 0/1 are going to be the most used. Mine are currently set up to stripe, not mirror, for all out speed. Though using USB 3.0 is going to limit your speed a bit compared to thunderbolt, I’m still seeing 300+ MB/s and I’m quite happy with that.

Cons: Why does “Professional” now have to mean Mac? I have been doing professional photography for 6 or 7 years on a Windows system with no problems. All but two of the most high end photographers I know use Windows for their systems because duh, they don’t have $3k to shell out on a laptop. I am not sure if this is directed at WD or not, but I think you get the idea. I wasn’t thrilled to have to re-format just to be able to even use the drive on my Windows 7/8/10 system. Yes, it is pretty painless for just about anyone.

Some of the reviews I’ve read on Newegg and elsewhere talk about how quiet the unit is because the cooling fan built in rarely, if ever has to kick on. This is true, I am yet to hear the cooling fan kick on, but that’s probably more a product of the environment it is in (cold computer room around 55º) rather than the device itself. Standard disk drives still make plenty of spinning, seeking, reading, writing noises and these are no different. I guess I wouldn’t call them loud per se, since they’re probably identical to every other HDD I own, but when they aren’t tucked away in a computer case, you’re a little more aware every time they spin up. Just be aware and don’t expect them to be super whisper quiet.

Other Thoughts: My system is admittedly a little bit on the older side (18 year old me NEVER thought I’d say that!) Running an AMD 1090T, 850W PSU, Radeon 6950 card, and 890G chipset motherboard. Good for 2011, and gets the job done in 2015. However, my machine does have USB 3.0 onboard, so pairing and getting everything set up was pretty easy, once I went in and set up the drive for Windows. The ability to hot-swap the drives very easily is nice, though I don’t see a whole lot of people having the need to hot swap 5 TB drives. I suppose if you have to (or if you have it set up for JBOD) the feature would be much more useful.

The bottom line: yes, its very expensive. But you get what you pay for!

Pros: This Western Digital My Book Pro external RAID enclosure features two 5 TB WD Black series hard drives. Each drive is rated for 7200 RPM and has 128 MB of cache. In my experience there is no better hard drive than Western Digital Black series. There are drives that are a bit faster, but their cost far outweighs the benefits and they're usually limited in capacity as well. With the Black series drives you get near SSD level performance, but far more capacity at a much more reasonable cost. I have also had experience with WD Purple, Red and Blue series drives as well. Each series is targeted for a specific type of task. For example, the Blue series is their economy line. If maximum capacity is your sole concern, and maximum bandwidth isn't a factor, the Blue series drives are a great choice. If you want capacity and the highest possible speed for gaming or for high resolution recording, then the Black series is the way to go. That's what you're getting with this external RAID enclosure. The highest capacity consumer level hard drives available and solid state drive level performance in a convenient, mobile platform.
This My Book Pro features 3 USB 3.0 ports, 2 on the front and one in the back. It also has a two Thunderbolt ports on the back as well. This device is nearly as convenient as any standard external hard drive. A bit bigger, of course, but it works the same way. But with an extraordinary advantage in capacity and bandwidth.
Cooling has certainly been taken into consideration when this RAID enclosure was designed. It has an external power supply, so heat from the power brick won't be a problem. It is also fan cooled. It has an 80mm exhaust fan to remove any heat the dual drives create.
This enclosure also has a power button. Which may not seem important, but it is nice to be able to turn it off when it's not needed. If you're using one of these, then you must have important data that you don't want lost and being able to maximize the life of your drives by simply turning it off when it's not needed is an excellent feature. But, a RAID array isn't as simple as a standard hard drive. It is recommended that you either shut down your computer or properly eject the drive manually in your OS to avoid data corruption.
With the included software you have the option to choose between RAID 1 or 0. Personally, I would only ever choose to use RAID 0. But RAID 1 does have advantages. RAID 1 or 0 requires identical had drives, which this already comes equipped with. RAID 1 only gives you access to half as much space. Whatever the capacity of a single drive of your RAID configuration is what you will have access to. But that has the advantage of being the faster option and your data is far more secure should one of the drives fail. With RAID 0 you will have all the capacity of both drives and excellent performance, but should one of the drives fail, all your data will be lost.

Cons: My system specs:
Core i7 4790K 4.8 GHz
Z97 OC Formula
16 GB DDR3 Trident X 2666 MHz
SLI GTX 980 Classified
RAID 0 SSDs, RAID 0 HDDs, BD-R
1000w PSU
Dual Custom liquid Cooling Loops
Win10 x64
I hooked up the My Book Pro to my PC via USB 3.0. Windows correctly recognized It and installed the appropriate drivers. But when I went to my "My PC" it wasn't listed. I opened Device Manager and it saw the My Book Pro. But for some reason I couldn't access the contents of the drive from anywhere. So to gain access, what I had to do was..
In Device Manager, right click on the My Book Pro drive and select uninstall.
Next, unhook the My Book Pro by unplugging the USB cable and restart the computer.
Then once Windows has rebooted, reconnect the drives USB cable. Once Windows has recognized the device, right click on the Start Button and select Disk Management.
When in disc management, right click on the primary partition section of the My Book Pro graph on the lower section of the window, and select Delete.
Once it has deleted the primary partition, right click again and select Format. When it asks, select NTFS as the file system and change the drive letter if you like. I left everything at default.
Once the drive has been formatted you should be able to access it as if it were any other drive. All the factory installed software will be gone, but you can download all of it from Western Digitals support website.
As I've never had that happen before and I've only been running Windows 10 for a couple weeks, I had to call Western Digitals phone support. A live chat support would have been more convenient, at least that is what I would have preferred. I'm not a fan for chatting over the phone. When I called their support, a woman with an Indian accent answered the phone. She was very polite, professional, spoke clearly and was skilled in support for Western Digital hardware. I asked a few off the wall questions about their software and she was able to answer without having look it up. Not a con really, but attached to the previous subject.
I tried to connect the My Book Pro to my router to see if I could use it for network access, but my router didn't recognize it. My router is a one of the newer high end models, so that is a feature that probably won't be supported.
I don't consider any of these things to be at the fault of this device or Western Digital. So I am not deducting any Eggs for this.

Other Thoughts: I tested this device in RAID 0 using Crystal Disk Mark, AS SSD and AIDA 64 benchmarks. I benchmarked file sizes between 256KB to 25GB. I also monitored transfer speeds from this RAID enclosure to my RAID SSDs with file sizes up to 50 GB. Sequential read and write speeds were fairly consistent across all my benchmarks, maxing out at around 390 MB/sec and dropping no lower than 340 MB/sec for both read and write. A RAID 1 configuration would probably get much closer to the rated maximum speed Western Digital advertises.
Swapping drives is a piece of cake. Just pop open the plastic cover for each of your hard drives. The drive on that side will eject as you open the plastic cover. Just grab ahold of the drive and pull it out. Reinstalling the drive is just as easy, just make sure your drive is oriented correctly and push it into place until it's seated back all the way. It will get to a point where you can feel the SATA power and data ports locking into position and the mech won't go back any further. To complete installation, you just close the plastic cover to lock the drive into proper position.
If you've already got one of these, and you find that 8-12 TB capacity isn't enough, you can Daisy chain up to 6 of these devices together. Giving you a virtually inexhaustible source of data storage. This feature would be particularly useful in a corporate setting. Giving your entire network access to a large data pool without the need for servers or a cloud, but with enough bandwidth to accommodate simultaneous access for multiple users. And the security of being able to disconnect it with a single yank of the cord or the push of a button.
This external RAID enclosure is an absolutely excellent source for high resolution recordings. I have been struggling with a way to record my 4K game play at 60 fps with 7.1 surround sound without dropping frames, stuttering, lag or just plain freezing. I have determined that using my primary data drive to run my OS and games while recording isn't a viable option for beyond 1080p. I was an early adopter of 4K technology and was eager to show off the quality of 4K game play on social media. However, at the time I had only a single 10K RPM Raptor hard drive. Which was only good enough to use as a primary OS drive while recording about 3 fps at 4K. So I upgraded to RAID 0 SSDs. Which was sufficient enough bandwidth to record my game play at 4K, 60 fps and beyond. But due to the minuscule drive size, the SSDs tended to fill up within a matter of a couple hours. However, with the speed of 2 Western Digital Black hard drives in RAID 0 and 9315 GB of free space I can record every session, no matter how long, and not run out of storage.
The build quality is excellent, it's very sturdy. Certain to hold up to a lot of abuse.
The My Book Pro is a serious performance external storage solution. If you have need for a mountain of storage, excellent speed and don't mind the cost, this is a great choice. I love it.

Pros: -Excellent performance for a disk drive, especially when the drives are less than 30% full.
-RAID 0, RAID 1, JBOD (individual drives/spanning)
-Easy to use software
-USB 3
-Auto Sleep when not in use. Is adjustable.
-Slim design, for what it is
-Writes with large files around 280 megabytes a second on RAID 0, Reads around 300.

Cons: -A bit loud with heavy disk utilization but that's to be expected given that these are WD Black drives and are meant for performance
-No ethernet port. I know I know...this isn't a NAS, but even if it was just a simple NAS with a simple user interface, that would have been better.
-Formatted out of the box for OSX not Windows so if you're not sure how to format a drive you might get stuck when you first open it

Other Thoughts: The software for it is simple, and easy to understand and use. I tested on a system via a USB 3.0 port running a Core i7, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB Samsung 850 EVO SSD to try to avoid any bottlenecks. I have to say I was impressed with the performance of this enclosure. I'd say this is ideal for people who work on projects with large images or videos and want to use this disk as a sort of scratch disk for their rendering, etc. Or in RAID 1 it could make it a very attractive option as a backup drive. On the whole, the product is well made. I really wish, however, it had the capability of being on the network, but it's not the end of the world.

Speaking on price, if it's on sale, it's not a bad deal. These are top tier or near top tier WD Black 5 TB drives. Performs well and if you fall into it's use case, I would highly recommend this being on your short list.

Pros: The My Book Pro is the perfect solution for portability and reliability. You can either have it use the drives as one large partition (10TB) or you can use a RAID configuration so you do not lose your data (5TB when in RAID 1).

When combined with a Wireless Router that supports a USB 3.0 Media Center it proves to be a very reliable network drive. Since it has RAID I copied all of my music, home videos and pictures to the drive. Since I use ROKU’s (and do streaming for TV) around the home I was able to access the My Book Pro from any room and any TV in the home.

The My Book Pro is the perfect solution for a network drive, media center with the right equipment. Its biggest feature is if the drive goes bad the data is all mirrored and you just need to replace it. No more worries about a virus taking over your computer or the hard drive crashing because all of the important data is farmed off to this separate drive on the Media Center network.

If you like listening to music on your PC (or laptop) you can use Media Monkey to connect into the Media Center and access all the music off the My Book Pro.

The drives are hot-swappable and if you ever need larger storage you can just buy new drives and take these out.

Cons: - This particular unit is very expensive

Other Thoughts: - Although the price for this 10TB unit is expensive there are lower options within the same family line of hardware. Anyone who takes a lot of family videos, pictures or has a large collection of music this is really a fantastic option for you.

- I did not report read/write speeds because the drives can go a lot faster than the USB 3.0 port would allow. There just was no point to it. However they can hit max throughput on the port easily.

Pros: Easy raid storage with super fast Thunderbolt 2
USB 3.0
Simple setup, simple tool/software downloads

Cons: You must download the latest software for tweaking.. I had to find something to say.

Other Thoughts: 1st and foremost this is primarily meant for Mac for use with the thunderbolt 2 capability so of course that is the 1st machine I tested it on ( the only Mac I have) and followed the plug in the power,plug in the Thunderbolt cable and there it was setup for speed.
Copying files to it (Write) ran smoothly at 565MB/s overall with peak at 700MB/s all while in a very quiet case.
Copying back to ssd was 564MB/s very impressive.
On to windows ( they have a less expensive alternative for usb 3.0 users)
1st off to use on windows you must 1st go into your system management and clear the drive/un allocate the drive and do a format on it for windows to be able to utilize it.
I then downloaded for windows smartware and utilities for windows from their website which is easy to find in the support area and then changed the drive using their software with a click of a button to raid 1 from striped to test it as a mirrored backup for maximum protection and that is good for video, picture, data critical items and such and tested over usb 3.0
and through many files and tests including pure video as a mirrored drive it had a read speed of 194MB/SEC and a write of 181MB/SEC.
These are Western Digital black drives and that is fast for standard non SSD drive consistent over an hour long period.
as a stripe drive it was 364.
The software that you can download can be setup to automatically backup files ,set timers for when to turn off the enclosure, change the raid configuration all at a simple click of the mouse.
A colleague of mine already has the standard windows one on his Christmas list.
Fast, quiet, cables included and built by a company that already has a superior reputation makes this raid setup a perfect item for anyone doing video editing, work backups, pictures and so on all in a small strong package.