WDC My Book Thunderbolt Duo Drive Pricing and Shipping Announced

[AppleDroid]

OWC doesn't make drives. They just buy them.

True but they don't put the drive into a POS enclosure with ports/connecters that die after a year. Everyone has to be a smarta** don't they?

 

[zorinlynx]

Thunderbolt is dead.

If they can't get the pricing to be reasonable, it will be dead before it even gets started.

Even when Firewire first came out, I don't remember external Firewire drives being this much more than USB. I think the price premium was $40 or so at most.

What the heck are they thinking?

 

[Eddyisgreat]

Thunderbolt is dead.

Thunderbolt is not dead boys and girls. Once other manufactures start picking it up and we will see an entire new breed of products that exploit the protocol agnostic nature of thunderbolt. Firewire and Thunderbolt are not the same. Infact Thunderbolt is around 20% cooler than firewire. You can pipe more than just storage (and TCP/IP) through Thunderbolt.

 

[mikerudolph22]

I like that this is under the "overview" tab for the unit. Professionals use Final Cut Pro! ...Not X.
Image

HAHA!! look at that monster! Is that really how big it is compared to an MBP?!?!

 

[wizard]

You forgot your indentation!

Insert obligatory series of posts:

[FONT="Courier New"]
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
}[/FONT]

Actually I'm not convinced that Intel is being greedy, at least not yet. I do think they want to be proprietary but that isn't the same thing. Either way the port will likely die if something isn't done to lower controller costs. I do believe the extra hardware costs are justified. It is really people's perceptions tat are all screwed up, I really don't know how this idea ever got started that TB was or is a USB replacement.

 

[wizard]

I agree with your points, but it will be a long time before TB becomes cheap.

I really don't see TB as a USB replacement, everybody getting wound up over the pricing of TB hardware just doesn't get it. The actual hardware required to produce the drives makes them expensive, beyond that the cost of the cable makes single drive disks too expensive by default.

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.

It will be a very long time before TB hardware is cheap relative to USB.

----------

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.

There are many things not to like about the iMac, but I have high hopes that this issue will go away with the advent of the Ivy Bridge machines. I honestly believe Apple wants this in their machines with the next rev to avoid looking antiquated.

 

[kkent25]

My Book Fail!

I know all hard drives fail at some point, but I have found My Book drives to be the worst!! I have had 5 fail on me in the space of 1 year or less. I'll never buy another one, ever!

 

[baryon]

Well I'm sticking with USB 2.0 thank you very much! It's not slow at all, and it's a hell of a lot cheaper.

 

[Augure]

1. So okay apparently it's Intel's fault that the licensing for Thunderbolt cost so much, almost no companies want to implement it on their product except for costly pro solutions.

2. But what I just said sounds really Apple like and that makes me afraid of one thing: that although all other PC manufacturer are implementing USB 3.0 and Ivy Bridges has USB 3.0 implemented as a base, the new iMacs and Macbook will deliberately stay on slow, cheap USB 2.0...

If that happens, I won't need another reason to switch back after having use Mac for 10 years.

 

[reel2reel]

Hopefully the team over at OWC (macsales) will start to implement TB into their drives. I've owned a WD, Seagate and a DIY external drive kit and all died after a year but my OWC drives just keep going.?

Unless it's a Qx2 RAID drive. Oh man, avoid the Qx2's like the plague. We have four of them in my workplace and they've all been useless for anything other than storage. They're unable to play any kind of video without stuttering to death. The copy speeds are fast, but they're unable to sustain a constant data rate.

They also constantly drop connections (through eSata or FW) and require constant reboots. Trash.

I love OWC for many things, but they refused to replace these or acknowledge the problem (just constant suggestions about anything else that could be the problem, including the RAID formats. Ugh).

We decided to take all the 3TB drives out of them, shoved them into Mac Pro's and call it a day. We've got four 12 TB LaCie 4Big's or whatever they're called and they perform beautifully.

 

[csHokie]

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.

Most likely it is to cut down on wireless interference that can happen quite a bit at trade shows...

 

[spl456]

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.

Bingo. Exactly what l am waiting for.
1tb, TB drive, reasonably priced.

 

[afin]

Thunderbolt is not dead boys and girls. Once other manufactures start picking it up and we will see an entire new breed of products that exploit the protocol agnostic nature of thunderbolt.

Yep. Once thunderbolt hits the full manufacturing market in these next few years we should see a nicer selection and hopefully more "wallet friendly" prices.

 

[sampdoria]

Jbod

I'm considering using this as JBOD connected to a MacMini...Drive A as a NAS and Drive B as a back-up. I'm not interested in RAID 1, just want them to be dumb and simple drives.

Could I remove Drive B and keep it off-site for safe-keeping (i.e. leave Drive B empty most of the time)? I could also purchase a third drive and swap it with Drive B periodically, if it is preferable not to leave Drive B empty.

Any sleep/wake issues with using WD MyBook Duos as a NAS? I'm planning on having the MacMini "on" 24/7 as a server for my home network.

Lastly, wondering if it's worth paying a premium for TB or go with FW for this setup.

Thanks in advance!

 

[ZballZ]

Would it be possible to get a 4 TB version, then partition the disks into 4x1TB partitions - then use 2x1TB for RAID0 and 2x1TB for RAID 1 ?

 

[AidenShaw]

+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

It's wonderful that PDP-11 assembly language lives long after the PDP-11 has faded from relevance.

(The "++" and "--" operators directly translate into PDP-11 assembly language addressing mode modifiers. Several other arcane features of "C" also are based on the PDP-11.)

TB adapters are coming too to connect FW to TB, usb to TB, etc.

...but $100 to $200 seems to be the cost of T-Bolt, plus the $50 cable.

Would it be possible to get a 4 TB version, then partition the disks into 4x1TB partitions - then use 2x1TB for RAID0 and 2x1TB for RAID 1 ?

As bretm said, it depends if the device exports a single LUN (so that the RAID level is set in the device), or whether the device can run in JBOD mode - so that the host sees two drives.

If the latter, one could do software RAID partitioning as you suggest.

Note, however, that in general it is a very bad idea to do RAID with multiple external enclosures. If you accidentally disconnect (or power down) one enclosure - the best situation (which I seen on my Windows Home Server with a couple of eSATA PM cabinets) is that the RAID 0 drives go offline and the RAID 1 drives drop the mirror drive and continue without redundancy. When you reconnect the drive - the RAID 0 drives come back online and the RAID 1 drive starts a "resynch" operation to restore the mirror set.

The failure modes possible with a RAID-5 volume spread across 3 or more external drives are just to scary to even consider.

 

[3282868]

A tad premature...

Claiming "LightPeak" (I refuse to use the marketed "Thunderbolt", seems lame) is already "dead" due to the current high costs of the [limited] available LP devices is a tad premature. We don't know the deal with licensing the tech and it will simply be a matter of time before mainstream adoption. Keep in mind the original LP developed utilized even more expensive fiber optic cabling, and copper was introduced to keep initial costs down. As more manufacturers enter the market with LP tech, mass production will inevitably bring costs down to a reasonable consumer level.

This is the case with most tech. I recall in the late '90's dishing out $799 for a 5-Disc Sony DVD player, and that was reasonable at the time. The sky isn't falling, LP hasn't even been utilized to its fullest potential. Imagine a new Mac Pro that's half its current size, with a LP cable running from it to your display and HID's on your desk. A smaller form factor that can be stored in a closet with its attached peripherals and a simple bi-directional cable connected to your display, etc at your desk. Just one example of what this tech could lead to in the future.

 

[twoodcc]

if the price comes down then i might consider it

 

[gnasher729]

You have to realize that the average hard drive has a slower transfer rate than FireWire 800.

Not anymore. On a modern hard drive, at least part of the drive has transfer rates over 100 MB/sec. And filling the write cache can be done faster than 100 MB/sec.

 

[aggri1]

You have to realize that the average hard drive has a slower transfer rate than FireWire 800.

Thus, thunderbolt only makes sense with raid configurations and/or SSD.

Hence the price.

I think you're generalising too much. The situation where the only alternative to ThunderBolt is USB2 (TWO!) is a case where a ThunderBolt single-drive does make sense. This situation occurs with the MacBook Air at the moment.

 

[spl456]

Claiming "LightPeak" (I refuse to use the marketed "Thunderbolt", seems lame)

Might seem lame, but products often change names when they go from ideas to design to testing to launch.

 

[AidenShaw]

Might seem lame, but products often change names when they go from ideas to design to testing to launch.

...but in this case the product itself went to "lame" between the technology demos and the release.

"Daisy chaining" is so '80s.

 

[repoman27]

Actually there are no licensing fees

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

There are certainly costs associated with fulfilling the terms of the licensing agreement required to produce products containing Thunderbolt technology.

Most estimates seem to peg the first gen Thunderbolt controllers at about $20-$30, or 10x what early USB 3.0 silicon cost. Production volumes were actually fairly similar for both interfaces during the first 12 months that they were shipping, however the die size of a Thunderbolt controller is roughly 2-3x that of a SuperSpeed USB controller manufactured on a similar process.

Thunderbolt is dead.

If they can't get the pricing to be reasonable, it will be dead before it even gets started.

Even when Firewire first came out, I don't remember external Firewire drives being this much more than USB. I think the price premium was $40 or so at most.

What the heck are they thinking?

They're thinking, "Oh, shoot! We done put a 2x10 Gbps, full-duplex I/O port in a whole bunch of consumer notebook and all-in-one PC's!" Price out any other currently available technology that puts 20 Gbps or more on a single cable. You're looking at technologies like 4X QDR/FDR InfiniBand, 40 or 100GbE, and ePCIe 2.0 x8/x16. All of these make Thunderbolt look massively cheap. Thunderbolt offers 5x more bandwidth than USB 3.0 and seems to add 10x more to the retail price of enabled devices. 100GbE offers 5x more bandwidth than Thunderbolt, and costs $50,000 to $80,000 per port.

Bingo. Exactly what l am waiting for.
1tb, TB drive, reasonably priced.

Thunderbolt is not the interface you are looking for.

 

[gnasher729]

I think you're generalising too much. The situation where the only alternative to ThunderBolt is USB2 (TWO!) is a case where a ThunderBolt single-drive does make sense. This situation occurs with the MacBook Air at the moment.

I recently bought an external drive, which then was actuallly taken apart and put into a MBP as internal drive (makes it easier to swap drive contents by putting the old drive into the new case). The drive was basically an internal drive, with a small attachment containing the SATA to USB converter, and a plastic case around it. The cost of that attachment is probably quite close to zero, because the drive was actually cheaper than an internal drive!

I would think that a similar attachment could be produced for Thunderbolt, and if mass produced then it should be quite cheap. On the other hand, many years ago I bought a USB 2 PCI card. You could buy basically the same card as "USB 2 card" for $10 and "USB 2 card for Macintosh" for $30. Identical cards.

 

[Macman45]

A shame they're still housed in those cheap looking plastic enclosures.

That, and the UK price will be what put's me off for now..I'm waiting for reliable high capacity SSD's.