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Of these, the WD Drive utilities are the most vital, as they allow you to change the RAID configuration of the Duo. External hard drives have come along way in a short time, and while the drives themselves have changed little, the technology and software around them have advanced at speed. Connection to your computer is via USB Type-C, and cables come for both this standard and to convert a conventional USB 3.0 port to the Type-C variety if you haven’t embraced that newish connector yet.
Incidentally, you can also set the unit to JBOD (which stands for ‘just a bunch of drives’), where each drive becomes a single volume/logical drive. We’re not sure why you might want to go this route, as it offers no redundancy against drive failure (like mirroring) or performance benefits (striping). But anyway, the option is there. This is the default mode of My Book Duo. With RAID-0, each file is split between two drives. As with RAID-1, your drive can read from both drives at the same time, so the reading speed is theoretically almost double (for sequential reading). Meanwhile, the storage capacity is the same as normal. If you have two 8TB drives, then when using them in RAID-0, you will have a single 16TB drive with one drive letter. The disadvantage of RAID-0 is that if either or both of the drives fail, you will lose the data in both drives, therefore the chance of failure is almost double. As well as the core features of the drive through the WD Discoveries App, you have access to further applications, some of which need to be paid for. Having this much capacity sounds like a dream, especially for those using a 4TB external drive or a smaller Duo model. But the dream of having this much space is also, oddly, something of a nightmare. If you have the Duo on the desk, the continuous rumbles and clunks can soon become annoying. WD need to consider that they are desktop devices and, therefore, need soundproofing added to make them less intrusive in quiet working environments.
MY BOOK DUO HARDWARE ENCRYPTION ISSUE
WD notes that this is a USB 3.1 Gen 1 port, omitting to state that this is what USB 3.0 is called these days. That connection has plenty of bandwidth for the output of two conventional hard drives even if they’re configured in striped RAID 1, and any extra can be used by other devices connected via a USB 3.0 hub. The reality is that curating 22TB or 44TB of data on the Duo is a significant exercise. Transferring it on and off can’t be done at a whim, and the thought of losing that much data through hardware failure is terrifying. For those who don’t care about read and write speeds and have two or three copies of everything they put on them, these are useful and cost-effective devices. But for anyone with an important data set to secure and manage, they’re probably the wrong way to go.
While it’s still a ‘My Book’ product, the new hardware looks much more like what it truly is; a tiny desktop server. The quoted transfer speed for the bare mechanisms is 210 MB/s, and in JBOD mode that’s almost exactly what you get. And, by providing a solution where the drives are accessible, your storage solution can be repaired if a drive fails, or be upgraded to larger capacity storage when you need that.
WHICH RAID SHOULD YOU USE?
a. The proprietary nature of the hardware RAID implementation means that the individual disk drives CANNOT be read outside of the MyBook Duo enclosure. I believe this is not unique to the MyBook Duo as many other RAID enclosures have the same characteristics. Currently, the largest desktop drive Seagate makes is a 20TB model. However, with Ironwolf drives with larger capacities now available, these are likely to be introduced to the Seagate Expansion series in the coming months.
The new My Book Duo has diverged in one major way from the previous designs; the rather lame ‘Book’ analogy has finally been terminated. This means that the disks are trapped inside the case and cannot be connected solo somewhere external or inside a PC. On the 20TB model in RAID 0, striped mode, you have a capacity of about 18.1TB available to use from the outset.We’d strongly recommend anyone buying this unit to reconfigure it to RAID 1 (Mirror) mode even if that waves aloha to 22TB of space. Having this volume of data on a device, assuming that neither drive will ever die, is more optimistic than is healthy for most people. The company’s My Book Duo range is an ideal solution for photographers and videographers. It’s also seen a recent and significant update, with an all-new design and ultra-fast connection. The beauty of the Duo is that you can easily remove the top and replace the drives if required, assuming you’ve removed all the data previously and powered down the drives. Storage here is the main concern and with the 12TB configured in RAID 1, you’re left with 6TB capacity. Chance of failure: higher. If the normal chance of failure of one drive is 1%, then the chance of failure with RAID-0 is almost double at 1.99%.
Where this device truly shines is in the terrific performance of the 10TB WD RED drives that give this unit more zip than physical hard drives normally deliver. I do a lot of photo editing and video editing, and I couldn’t get a clear answer on this. At first I tried RAID-0, and usually it seemed faster, although sometimes it was slower. I found that when I was extracting zip files from within the My Book Duo in RAID-0, it was extremely slow. Whereas on my usual external drive, expanding that same zip file took only a second or two, it would take a minute or longer on the My Book Duo. Unplug the router's power and wait 30 seconds. Reconnect power to the router and wait for it to reboot. Once this is complete, attempt to access the Dashboard again. The My Book Duo is far more than just a simple external drive. It has a wealth of additional features that will appeal to photographers and videographers. Features videos and 360 photos can take up a lot of space, especially if you use high quality formats such as Prores or TIFF. I’ve almost filled up two 8TB hard drives and was looking for an external hard drive and chose the WD My Book Duo is an external hard drive with two bays that can each accommodate standard 3.5-inch hard drives.
Western Digital goes big on personal storage
Are you looking for more storage for your 360 photos and videos? Here’s a hands-on review of WD My Book Duo, a fast, expandable external hard drive. However, it has a potential dealbreaker – hardware encryption (see below). I’ll also discuss the basics of RAID. One aspect of this design we wish was better is how noisy it can be. The fault-tolerant drives in these units are always doing something even when the drive isn’t in implicit use. As default, the drive arrives formatted as NTFS which is a PC file system. As a Mac user, I’ll need to reformat as a Mac Format, either JHFS+ or APFS. I’ve selected JHFS+ for maximum compatibility.
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