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Macworld 2012: WDC Shows Off MyBook Thunderbolt Duo
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Actually, the WD 3T Aluminium USB2/FW800 externals are quite good drives, far better than Lacie and less expensive to boot.
Having lost much date due to using Lacie as back-up drives, I've been using WD for two years now in 500G/1T and 2T formats - I've had no failures thus far - further, they carry a reasonable warranty should the unit fail, and the actual internal HDD has a full three year warranty, regardless of the enclosure, its the HDD you should worry about.
Regrettably, and due to the This flooding, here in HK, WD drives have gone up in price at a ridiculous level, indeed, it was cheaper to purchase from Apple Store than local re-sellers - and, I missed out on the big increase Apple made in prices in November.
So, yes, I'd be very interested in two of these puppies in 8T format, one as a primary storage unit and the other as a back-up - given BluRay rips are now about 3G per movie, you need as much storage space as possible for your media centre.
It will also be great to make use of Thunderbolt at long last - i'm in the process of moving all my systems to Thunderbolt enabled this year, which means investing in two 'used' iMac's and Mac Mini's - both of which should last a good three years at least - hopefully, the WD enclosures will last that long as well.
Having lost much date due to using Lacie as back-up drives, I've been using WD for two years now in 500G/1T and 2T formats - I've had no failures thus far - further, they carry a reasonable warranty should the unit fail, and the actual internal HDD has a full three year warranty, regardless of the enclosure, its the HDD you should worry about.
Regrettably, and due to the This flooding, here in HK, WD drives have gone up in price at a ridiculous level, indeed, it was cheaper to purchase from Apple Store than local re-sellers - and, I missed out on the big increase Apple made in prices in November.
So, yes, I'd be very interested in two of these puppies in 8T format, one as a primary storage unit and the other as a back-up - given BluRay rips are now about 3G per movie, you need as much storage space as possible for your media centre.
It will also be great to make use of Thunderbolt at long last - i'm in the process of moving all my systems to Thunderbolt enabled this year, which means investing in two 'used' iMac's and Mac Mini's - both of which should last a good three years at least - hopefully, the WD enclosures will last that long as well.
Well we have had 2 of the 3tb drives fail at work, one of them the hdd was fine but the bridge in the enclosure failed and the other one both the bridge and hdd failed due to heat. I have also personally had one of the 1tb WD drives fail, once again it was the drive and enclosure that failed.
I now use a Stardom iTank hotswap enclosure with a hitachi 3tb drive installed and it runs much cooler, twice as quiet and actually has faster transfer speeds. I also have a 5 year warranty on the enclosure and a 3 year warranty on the drive itself. I will never go back to prebuilt WD, lacie or seagate external drives.
I am pretty much waiting for OWC to come out with Thunderbolt enclosures then add my own Western Digital HDDs to them but since WD is coming out with a user serviceable/replaceable enclosure along with the drives, I might just have to buy directly from WD and replace the drives as they become full in the future. Nice.
I'd prefer something similar to the Promise enclosure as well. However, I'd imagine the enclosure alone would retail for at least ~$800. Hell, a Drobo S with a similar set up and has a max I/O of FW800 retails for $800 the last time I checked. And that's yesterday's technology that they're still selling!
The best thing we can hope for is OWC coming out with a 2-bay Thunderbolt enclosure that sells for under $130. Actually, I'd love to get a 4-bay enclosure and hope that it retails for under $200, highly doubt it though.
Or, one arm and two legs. Seriously, the price to play is way out of most peoples price range. It's not going to come down until the Windows side of everything helps drive the pricing. But then again, they have USB 3.0 so why bother?
Actually the silver edition is already for sale
I was exactly thinking the same. I hope this company gets some attention and the next versions will support booting. It is really nice integrated and have the time time machine interface for looking at snapshots. Getting a mac mini with a 2 SSD's and thunderbolt would make a perfect storage server with ZFS. Like you said. I believe ZFS is the way to go.
$1200 including drives for the 4TB one and $1900 for the 6TB one. This is Australian dollars.
You are right though, eventually company's like OWC and Stardom will release quality thunderbolt enclosures for a decent price, its just a matter of time really. I have a Stardom iTank FW800 enclosure atm and i love it.
I always bought Hitachi drives and until now not one single disk failed.
Except when I connected 3 of those 2.5" disks to a Usb port in Indonesia, all three of them failed after a while, but that could also be because of a rather cheap USB/FW enclosure.(Too high voltage)
I agree with others that for now these drives/enclosures are too expensive for normal consumers.
But hey, do normal consumers need the speed?
Yeah i have had 3 hitachi hdd's over the past 4 years and not one of them has ever failed, i have always pulled them out of my iMac to upgrade the size but never due to a failure.
If i ever get a Thunderbolt raid enclosure i will probably put Hitachi drives in it the little stand that reflects the speaker sound forward sounds silly, but it does really work surprising well.
Maybe for the iPhone5, apple will actually do a little bit towards function over form and put the speakers in the right place so one doesn't need that sort of product in the future!
Maybe for the iPhone5, apple will actually do a little bit towards function over form and put the speakers in the right place so one doesn't need that sort of product in the future!
If this configuration is a RAID array, what happens when you plug in a different variety of disks? After setup, does that mean you can now only use the 4 drives together?
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Thanks! Though, an empty enclosure where I could choose my own SSD would have been preferred.. I'll look into that..
Yeah i think we will be waiting a little while longer before we see empty single slot thunderbolt enclosures.
This is infuriating as Tbolt was touted as a superior REPLACEMENT for USB 3.0 in macdom. Instead we're stuck with $1000 Hd enclosures and $50 cables!
Meanwhile 2 empty high quality usb 3.0 enclosures plus 2 256gb SSD's goes for less than these overpriced tbolt external drives.
I have two 4TB FW800 models (one backs up the other since both are RAID 0) and I'm getting close to maxing them, so I'll be interested in these 6TB models. I'm willing to pay a bit of a premium for TB (say $50 a drive), but if it's more like $100 or even $150 a drive, I'll stick with FW800.
The sweet spot for T-Bolt external storage will probably never be the "single disk" enclosure - USB 3.0 handles that case just fine for the 99% and for much less money.
Consider that the T-Bolt enclosure has to have a T-Bolt controller, a PCIe bus, and a SATA controller on the PCIe bus. That makes it quite likely to be north of $100/enclosure even before you add the disks.
Since you have the substantial up-front cost for the T-Bolt and SATA controllers, a multi-disk enclosure makes more sense overall.
I've bought 4 drive eSATA expander cabinets for less than $80. That has all the metal, the drive mounts, the power supply and an eSATA PM controller. With that as a baseline, a 4 drive empty T-Bolt cabinet should be priced at around $150. (Take a credit for not needing the PM controller, T-Bolt controller for $10, 4-port SATA PCIe cards are under $20 retail,....)
I used to do the "buy a little more storage" trip, but learned that in the long run that it's cheaper and much less hassle to double or quadruple capacity at each step. (Especially if your new setup has empty drive slots - so that in six months or a year you can buy bigger drives at a better price per GB.)
This is especially true if you consider that drive slots (or T-Bolt daisy chain positions) are a very limited resource.
I had a poor experience with Drobo, but if a 4-5 bay TB enclosure is available for a reasonable (to me) price, I'd be willing to try it. I just can't justify what Promise wants for their Pegasus arrays.