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Original poster
Apr 12, 2001
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30,136



duo2.jpg



At Macworld 2012, we highlighted the newly announced My Book Thunderbolt Duo drive from WDC. Each drive enclosure held two hard drives in a RAID configuration and offered two Thunderbolt ports. The units could then be daisy chained together over Thunderbolt to create a single high performance logical drive.

WDC has since announced shipping and availability of the new drive systems.
The new My Book Thunderbolt Duo provides professionals and Mac® enthusiasts with five primary areas of performance, double-safe data protection and flexibility; ultra-fast data transfer rates for greater work efficiency; a 4 TB/6 TB large-capacity; customized dual-drive storage system with RAID 0, 1 and JBOD options; customer serviceable drives; and dual Thunderbolt ports for daisy-chaining multiple My Book Thunderbolt Duo devices or other peripherals.
Pricing for the new enclosures has been set at $599.99 USD MSRP (4 TB) and $699.99 (6 TB) and are available online.

To compare, the Thunderbolt version seems to carry a $200 premium over their My Book Studio Edition II drive system which provides a similar setup (4TB/$399, 6TB/$499), though without Thunderbolt performance and connectivity.

Article Link: WDC My Book Thunderbolt Duo Drive Pricing and Shipping Announced
 

kolax

macrumors G3
Mar 20, 2007
9,181
115
Love the potential Thunderbolt has, but the price is just horrific for the products that use it.

Was hoping that this year we'd see more consumer friendly prices for Thunderbolt accessories.
 

iRCL

macrumors 6502
Nov 2, 2011
284
0
Insert obligatory series of posts:

for(i = 0; i < 30; ++i)
{
(average Mac user) LOL this is ridiculous who would pay that. Why do we even have TB ports. Apple is greedy
(person representing 0.3% of market) PROs do, you wouldn't know that though because all you do is use fb
(more informed Mac user) Actually Intel is being greedy because of licensing
}
 
Last edited:

Small White Car

macrumors G4
Aug 29, 2006
10,966
1,463
Washington DC
I'm interested in seeing how these compare to the pegasus drives.

Does anyone know if there's any way to mirror 2 external thunderbolt drives? I've mostly been interested in the pegasus because it looks like you can set up a RAID 1+0 on it and get speed and redundancy. I am SO sick of Time Machine, I'm thinking of moving to a mirrored drive system as my safety method.

Until today that's meant the pegasus is what I've had my eye on. If there was some way to mirror two of these My Books I'd be interested. But I don't have any reason to think that's possible. Anyone know?
 

BeamWalker

macrumors 6502a
Dec 18, 2009
531
285
After the Problems I had with the Firewire version of my MyBook I think I'd rather go with Lacie.
 

AcesHigh87

macrumors 6502a
Jan 11, 2009
985
324
New Brunswick, Canada
Was really hoping these guys would be the start of more affordable TB drives; shame that’s not the case. I can buy 4TB worth of firewire drives for less than half of that price. Sure the transfer rates are amazing but as long as the pricetag stays high, sales will stay low.
 

bjm2660

macrumors 6502
Jun 7, 2011
332
0
Virginia
Why is there a stupid apple wired mouse at the display? That doesn't encourage the state-of-the-art image that they are attempting to evoke.
 

arn

macrumors god
Staff member
Apr 9, 2001
16,362
5,794
Was really hoping these guys would be the start of more affordable TB drives; shame that’s not the case. I can buy 4TB worth of firewire drives for less than half of that price. Sure the transfer rates are amazing but as long as the pricetag stays high, sales will stay low.

Seems that's the point though, no? If you're not looking for high performance or RAID, thunderbolt won't help you that much. You'll hit the single non-ssd drive bottleneck first, no?

arn
 

aristokrat

macrumors regular
Apr 15, 2007
184
7
I'm interested in seeing how these compare to the pegasus drives.

Does anyone know if there's any way to mirror 2 external thunderbolt drives? I've mostly been interested in the pegasus because it looks like you can set up a RAID 1+0 on it and get speed and redundancy. I am SO sick of Time Machine, I'm thinking of moving to a mirrored drive system as my safety method.

Until today that's meant the pegasus is what I've had my eye on. If there was some way to mirror two of these My Books I'd be interested. But I don't have any reason to think that's possible. Anyone know?

Drive mirroring is not an effective data backup system, as it only protects you from drive failure. You'd still be prone to data corruption (thanks HFS+) and file deletion.
 

Small White Car

macrumors G4
Aug 29, 2006
10,966
1,463
Washington DC
I've had two of these drives, I get the feel the company thinks of them as disposable. Will wait for something a little more "pro" like G-Tech.

I've had a 'My Book' go bad.
I've had two G-Tech drives go bad.
LaCie? Ha ha...oh man.

I don't really care much for these "well this brand failed me" kind of discussions. ALL external drives are a risk and ALL of them will let you down eventually.

I've had failures from every major brand out there. So what do you do? I insist on redundancy and keep 2 of every file. Drives breaks. It's going to happen. I refuse to get caught up in worrying about it, otherwise I'd have run out of brands to buy a long, long time ago.


Drive mirroring is not an effective data backup system, as it only protects you from drive failure. You'd still be prone to data corruption (thanks HFS+) and file deletion.

I'm not worried about file deletion. Data corruption is a concern, but my time machine is currently only 100% the size of my data, so I don't have protection from that right now anyway! If it's corrupt, my current Time Machine will faithfully back that up. So even if mirroring's not perfect, it's not worse than what I currently have.
 

GenesisST

macrumors 68000
Jan 23, 2006
1,802
1,055
Where I live
Insert obligatory series of posts:

for(i = 0; i < 30; ++i)
{
<average Mac user> LOL this is ridiculous who would pay that. Why do we even have TB ports. Apple is greedy
<person representing 0.3% of market> PROs do, you wouldn't know that though because all you do is use fb
<more informed Mac user> Actually Intel is being greedy because of licensing
}

+100 for your "++i" instead of "i++". People at my work make fun of me because I do this out of an old habit... My fingers just can't do post increment
 

ghostface147

macrumors 601
May 28, 2008
4,150
5,122
I just want a 1 terabyte thunderbolt backup drive, nothing else. Like one of those passport ones from Western Digital. If a non-thunderbolt costs about $120, I don't see why a thunderbolt one would cost too much more.
 

kolax

macrumors G3
Mar 20, 2007
9,181
115
Seems that's the point though, no? If you're not looking for high performance or RAID, thunderbolt won't help you that much. You'll hit the single non-ssd drive bottleneck first, no?

arn

Daisy-chaining. That's the main reason I want Thunderbolt accessories.

External display, speakers, USB hub and Thunderbolt hard drives all from one cable. Right now, I have to plug in 3-4 different cables into my laptop when I dock it at my desk. Bit of a pain.
 

Small White Car

macrumors G4
Aug 29, 2006
10,966
1,463
Washington DC
I just want a 1 terabyte thunderbolt backup drive, nothing else. Like one of those passport ones from Western Digital. If a non-thunderbolt costs about $120, I don't see why a thunderbolt one would cost too much more.

Because all these Thunderbolt drives contain at least 2 drives. There's no point in a TB drive with just one drive. It won't be any faster than firewire.

As others have said, daisy-chaining will be nice, but that will only come once TB chips are cheaper. Right now the drive has to cost a little more, just for the TB interface. No one's going to buy a TB drive that costs more and isn't faster. So they're sticking to fast RAIDs for now as a selling point, and once the ports and chips are cheaper you'll see them come to single drives. But if they made those today no one would buy them.
 

swarmster

macrumors 6502a
Jun 1, 2004
640
113
TB cable included with that price?

No, cable purchased separately.

Oddly, they don't mention what kind of drives they've put inside. The My Book Studio Edition II uses their Green drives, and this probably does, too, for heat/reliability reasons, but if they were high speed Black drives, that could account for the extra $200 as well.
 

Skika

macrumors 68030
Mar 11, 2009
2,999
1,246
Why is there a stupid apple wired mouse at the display? That doesn't encourage the state-of-the-art image that they are attempting to evoke.

Maybe because its easier for it to NOT be stolen? Since it looks like this was taken at some tech show.
 
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