I shucked my WD My Book Duo drives, Red label 4TB 5400rpm, out of the Duo box. I had problems with it timing out and losing the USB connection to my iMac. That could be in part due to heat build up. It is easy to pop the top of the Duo box and pull out the drives which are installed in trays. Note that you need a Tory T5 screwdriver for the 4 screws that hold the drives in the trays.
Those two Red drives were installed in a Akitio Thunderbolt 3 Quad X enclosure in slots A & B. Using MacOS Disk Utility I reformatted the drives and make them in to a RAID 0 with 128K block size. I selected a larger block size as I have terabytes of large raw photos. The read and write speeds were into 300mbps range. Of course that would be faster if I had WD Black drives.
Then I shucked my WD My Book drive that is one of the white label Red drives running at 5400rpm. Some folks have problems with the white drives as they are built to latest SATA spec 2.3. That spec allows for pin 3 to cause a hard reset of the drive if voltage is applied. No problem putting the drive in the Quad X as they do not apply voltage to pin 3. Big cost saving as a Red label 8TB drive would be over $200 each. The WD My Book 8TB sells for $169.99 at B&H and others.
Very happy with the Quad X enclosure and the performance of the shucked WD drives. Good value for money. BTW, if you register you Quad X online, Akitio will add one more year of warranty support.
Those two Red drives were installed in a Akitio Thunderbolt 3 Quad X enclosure in slots A & B. Using MacOS Disk Utility I reformatted the drives and make them in to a RAID 0 with 128K block size. I selected a larger block size as I have terabytes of large raw photos. The read and write speeds were into 300mbps range. Of course that would be faster if I had WD Black drives.
Then I shucked my WD My Book drive that is one of the white label Red drives running at 5400rpm. Some folks have problems with the white drives as they are built to latest SATA spec 2.3. That spec allows for pin 3 to cause a hard reset of the drive if voltage is applied. No problem putting the drive in the Quad X as they do not apply voltage to pin 3. Big cost saving as a Red label 8TB drive would be over $200 each. The WD My Book 8TB sells for $169.99 at B&H and others.
Very happy with the Quad X enclosure and the performance of the shucked WD drives. Good value for money. BTW, if you register you Quad X online, Akitio will add one more year of warranty support.
