WDC My Book Thunderbolt Duo Drive Pricing and Shipping Announced

[iBug2]

Exactly. That's what I want too, and I don't want to pay more than $200 for it. If Thunderbolt is going to take off, there needs to be more consumer-oriented products for it.

This is TB taking off. People expecting a wide range use such as USB 2.0 are on the wrong track. TB is never going to be as popular as USB, like Firewire never was.

 

[MrNomNoms]

It seems once again WDC tells international customers outside the main centres to go 'f-ck themselves'. Ho hum, once again from the jaws of victory they seem to be hell bent on making it a failure.

 

[mijail]

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.

Doesn't TM provide a number of past versions of the file?
If it does, mirroring is not a substitute.

 

[applesith]

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.

Maybe green based on the very very vague image on the site:

 

[Derpage]

No drive is worth 100 bux a TB, no matter how much time it saves me.

 

[John.B]

Are these MSRP prices? Can we expect these to be discounted at discount retailers, big box stores, etc.?

 

[Incindium]

Umm With those drives you can daisy chain them and create a 24TB logical drive. We recently bought a similar directed attach storage solution from HP for $10,000 at work(most of the other competitors prices were in the $15k range).

$2800 for that same thing via Thunderbolt is a good price and the prices will only go down from there.

 

[guzhogi]

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?

Under Disk Utility, select one of the disks (the whole disk, not the partition) and choose RAID. That'll tell you what to you need to do. It's software RIAD, so not as fast as hardware RAID, but hopefully it'll work for you.

 

[sinisterdesign]

After the Problems I had with the Firewire version of my MyBook I think I'd rather go with Lacie.

i've been suckered into buying a number of Lacie drives b/c of their slick design (in my defense, i'm a designer), but those drives have crapped out on me time & time again, along w/ 2 of my friends that bought Lacies over the years, too. maybe we all just had the exceptions to the rule, but i'm never buying a Lacie again.

 

[hitekalex]

After the Problems I had with the Firewire version of my MyBook I think I'd rather go with Lacie.

I had a LaCie LBD Thunderbolt drive for a week - the thing is noisy. It's louder than my MacMini running at full load. I just couldn't stand it, so the drive went back.

I would be curious to see how these MyBook drives are in terms of fan noise.

Do you feel that Apple will ever introduce a Thunderbolt version of Time Machine?

What does "Thunderbolt version of Time Machine" mean? TM is a backup software, it will work with any types of drives, Thunderbolt or not.

 

[Small White Car]

Doesn't TM provide a number of past versions of the file?
If it does, mirroring is not a substitute.

Only if your TM drive is bigger than the amount of files you have. Mine is not, so no, I don't have that.

Under Disk Utility, select one of the disks (the whole disk, not the partition) and choose RAID. That'll tell you what to you need to do. It's software RIAD, so not as fast as hardware RAID, but hopefully it'll work for you.

Thanks. I'm familiar with the software, I just didn't know if it would play nice with Thunderbolt. I clicked through to the older article about these drives and it seems that WD does intend for us to do what you said. So it looks like your advice is spot on.

 

[bjm2660]

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

I considered that, but really the wired mouse is just as easily stolen if the table is unattended by a representative of Western Digital. It's just plugged in to the keyboard. Perhaps you mean that it is less valuable.

 

[iMikeT]

I've been waiting for something like since Thunderbolt was included on Macs but $600 for the 4TB model and the cable isn't included? Still too much for me.

I'm hoping that Newegg will sell these for a lot less but I won't be holding my breath. On top of that, bare hard drives are still being sold well above what they were pre-Thailand flood.

It looks like my dream of building a 20TB array will continue to be on hold for now.

 

[velocityg4]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

If these have the hardware to support RAID 50 or even 60 I could see some professionals using this as a cheap alternative to a similar but more expensive card and large enclosure.

 

[theSeb]

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
}

Actually there are no licensing fees

Similarly, there’s no per-port licensing fee or royalty for peripheral manufacturers to use the port or the Thunderbolt controller.

The parts themselves do cost a fair bit in comparison to USB 3 etc because of the low numbers in production.

 

[ghostface147]

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.

I would. Several people I know would also buy them for Time Machine backups.

 

[daxomni]

I can see why all the ThunderBlunder designers are so interested in substantially lowering the cost of implementation vastly increasing the raw port speed. That should do the trick.

 

[jazz1]

I hope they fixed the wake from sleep problem I had with two of my older versions (via firewire). The only way I got it to work if to put a LaCie first in the chain. WD support after sale is awful BTW

 

[kas23]

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.

That's assuming the buyer chooses the RAID 1 option and assuming there are fast HDDs within the enclosure (read: not WD green drives). So, it's entirely possible these drives could be just be a little bit faster than FW under "normal" use. This is also assuming that some less intellectually fortunate person doesn't buy this, just because it's the hottest thing, then primarily accesses it wirelessly.

I still think they shouldn't even be making these TB drives without SSD drives or at least > 2 drive spaces. I suppose we'll see once someone buys one and puts it through its paces.

 

[bigcat318]

Yes, be a jerk on the internet. That will make you feel excellent about yourself. It may even get you layed if you brag of such exploits in the local drinking establishment.

I think he has a valid point. If you are in any sort of professional environment time is money. In a hypothetical situation having to wait 4 hours vs having to wait 1 hour is a huge difference, and repeated frequently the time savings would easily pay for the added cost.

So really your angry overreaction to his comment made you look like more of a jerk.

 

[Dionte]

One thing I don't like about my imac is that is has Thunderbolt, devices I can't afford vs. Usb 3.0, devices I can afford.

 

[Derpage]

I think he has a valid point. If you are in any sort of professional environment time is money. In a hypothetical situation having to wait 4 hours vs having to wait 1 hour is a huge difference, and repeated frequently the time savings would easily pay for the added cost.

So really your angry overreaction to his comment made you look like more of a jerk.

Negatory Ghost rider, your condescending-ometer is way off. Anybody in businesses will use one of the many, faster enterprise solutions available to them. This is cheaply made end-user swill with no redeeming value. Smaller companies will be much better served by one of the many cheap cloud options available to them.

 

[edk99]

If the new MBP's have USB3 then I will save the $250 (with cable) and get the USB3 drive.

 

[RalfTheDog]

I wonder if it would be faster to do internal striping and soft mirror or internal mirroring and soft stripe? If that picture is accurate, the top pops off and you can swap out the drives. I wonder if you could pop out the spin drives, replace them with big SSD drives, then use the old spin drives in network devices that don't need the speed?

 

[bigcat318]

Negatory Ghost rider, your condescending-ometer is way off. Anybody in businesses will use one of the many, faster enterprise solutions available to them. This is cheaply made end-user swill with no redeeming value. Smaller companies will be much better served by one of the many cheap cloud options available to them.

Cant believe cloud options were just used in a conversation about saving time.