Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Western Digital Announces 20TB My Book Duo RAID Desktop Storage System
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
"... You have absolutely no idea as to what you're talking about. When do schools start again... "
such passion, do you work for WD?
Long ago when rock was dirt i bought a Drobo nas box it was the only brand to buy back than. I use it every day for home use and it has gone through many drive crashes with success. But I only used 6.5T or 45% of its capacity to date. I use it write once read many times. I dont delete stuff. Not with out trying i have never come close to filling it up. Only a small percentage of home owners could fill 10-20T with content. Home usage is small and an SSD equivalent is possible. A ssd array would allow me not pay for off site backup. About once a year i need to replace a drive or two, this costs money.
A Drobo box is way slow, even for a small office environment. co-workers would thank their IT person if he gave them SSD.
such passion, do you work for WD?
Long ago when rock was dirt i bought a Drobo nas box it was the only brand to buy back than. I use it every day for home use and it has gone through many drive crashes with success. But I only used 6.5T or 45% of its capacity to date. I use it write once read many times. I dont delete stuff. Not with out trying i have never come close to filling it up. Only a small percentage of home owners could fill 10-20T with content. Home usage is small and an SSD equivalent is possible. A ssd array would allow me not pay for off site backup. About once a year i need to replace a drive or two, this costs money.
A Drobo box is way slow, even for a small office environment. co-workers would thank their IT person if he gave them SSD.
This is nice but after 16 years of Mac usage (family of 6) we still haven't filled up my 2TB drives inside my MBPs and iMac.
I keep my Studio movies on Blu-Ray, so I don't need to stream (yet).
I'm still waiting for SSDs to drop in price so I can soup up my old 2011/2012 Macs, but once I do I'll be good to go for another 6 years.
Getting a current MBP with the same amount of storage (2TB) I have now would be a $1,200 ($1,400 on the iMac) upcharge on top of an already expensive machine (pushing it well north of $4K).
I can add the same amount of SSD storage to my 17, 15, or iMac for HALF that, with 2 1TB SSD drives in RAID 0, which will smoke pretty much ANY stock Mac. No thanks Apple.
My external drives I use merely for overnight backups and maintenance on internal drives, so I don't require the speed an SSD provides (although it would be nice) in those situations.
I keep my Studio movies on Blu-Ray, so I don't need to stream (yet).
I'm still waiting for SSDs to drop in price so I can soup up my old 2011/2012 Macs, but once I do I'll be good to go for another 6 years.
Getting a current MBP with the same amount of storage (2TB) I have now would be a $1,200 ($1,400 on the iMac) upcharge on top of an already expensive machine (pushing it well north of $4K).
I can add the same amount of SSD storage to my 17, 15, or iMac for HALF that, with 2 1TB SSD drives in RAID 0, which will smoke pretty much ANY stock Mac. No thanks Apple.
My external drives I use merely for overnight backups and maintenance on internal drives, so I don't require the speed an SSD provides (although it would be nice) in those situations.
The folks declaring the end of spinning disks will eventually be proven right, but we're still years (if not decades) away from that. In the here and now, cheap SSDs are still roughly 10x more expensive than cheap HDDs on a $/GB basis* (closer to 15x if you want to go for NVMe SSDs), which means that the answer for which you should get will depend entirely on your use case. It's just a matter of balancing cost, capacity, latency, and throughput.
Media and backup servers thrive with high capacity and aren't heavily affected by latency or throughput, so HDDs are the way to go if you want bang for your buck. Boot drives thrive with low latency and high throughput, but generally don't need much capacity, so SSDs will make your computer feel like it's brand new without breaking the bank.
And for the research I was doing in grad school (working with a dataset my team had collected from the then-largest web crawl in academia, equal to roughly 20% of what Google had at the time), I desperately needed massive capacity, low latency, AND high throughput, but it would have literally cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to store that much data on SSDs, so I had to settle for spinning disks.
* Don't take my word for it. Here are PCPartPicker's prices from today:
- The cheapest SSD is 25 cents/GB
- The cheapest HDD is 2.4 cents/GB (admittedly, decent ones don't start until 3-3.5 cents/GB, with WD Reds being available for as little as 3.3)
Media and backup servers thrive with high capacity and aren't heavily affected by latency or throughput, so HDDs are the way to go if you want bang for your buck. Boot drives thrive with low latency and high throughput, but generally don't need much capacity, so SSDs will make your computer feel like it's brand new without breaking the bank.
And for the research I was doing in grad school (working with a dataset my team had collected from the then-largest web crawl in academia, equal to roughly 20% of what Google had at the time), I desperately needed massive capacity, low latency, AND high throughput, but it would have literally cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to store that much data on SSDs, so I had to settle for spinning disks.
* Don't take my word for it. Here are PCPartPicker's prices from today:
- The cheapest SSD is 25 cents/GB
- The cheapest HDD is 2.4 cents/GB (admittedly, decent ones don't start until 3-3.5 cents/GB, with WD Reds being available for as little as 3.3)
Apple TV with 4K support and this 20 TB thing is the ideal Plex setup.
I need a 4K TV tho which I still don't have so......
I need a 4K TV tho which I still don't have so......
To be fair the first Drobo's were terrible slow due to the internal interfaces and their software solution for managing raids and the like. I had one and returned it because of the slow read/write speeds. I then went to a Buffalo box and never looked back to Drobo.
Of course, even back then, I was using it for streaming music and dvd's. But loading the data onto the device let alone being able to stream it wasn't cutting the mustard.
Let's have those 20TB with 5GBit Ethernet NIC and a 2,5" slot for a write cache drive... coz those 10TB drives are for sure SMR drives which are only fast when writing to the non-SMR cache*, which can be a real PITA when you're doing backups on said drives. 200GB Backup: written to disc in no time. 300GB Backup suddenly takes significantly more time.
(*Not sure if the drive now will use any available space as non-SMR-cache, but if they are still using a fixed size cache of only a few 100GB they are almost useless for certain scenarios [without using a dedicated cache drive])
They weren't forced to drop USB-A for USB-C... could have had both...
(*Not sure if the drive now will use any available space as non-SMR-cache, but if they are still using a fixed size cache of only a few 100GB they are almost useless for certain scenarios [without using a dedicated cache drive])
They weren't forced to drop USB-A for USB-C... could have had both...
Please. For backups and large file storage, mechanical HDs are just fine, and vastly cheaper. But by all means, if you want to spend thousands and thousands of dollars to back up a big media library, enjoy yourself.
[doublepost=1503613688][/doublepost]
This is gonna blow your mind, but: some people have larger storage needs than yours. Crazy, right? You learn something every day.
You'd think that with these huge (for home use) capacities, they would have included Raid 10. Have they? I wasn't able to ascertain that.
Also, personally I'm not a huge fan of hardware Raid, which is almost exclusively proprietary. If the enclosure fails, only an identical enclosure if still available, can save all your Data on the drive(s) within.
The prices aren't bad, although as you alluded, these are not likely Enterprise drives.
Does anyone know the MTBF ratings?
I would love to live in your fantasy land where no SSD:s ever fail, replacing SSD:s apparently don't cost money, no arrays fails, no corruption, no controller failure, no house fires, no robberies, no force majeure scenario, no nothing, because an SSD surely prevents all this by some incredible miracle
Two cheap SATA drives can't fill up plain USB3 5Gb speeds. They're "eco-drives" usually built to run long and save power, not speed. There's no point making it more expensive than is needed.
The irony is that this WD drive has 2 USB-A ports for being used as a down stream USB hub as well.
Last edited:
It takes a minimum of 4 disks (2^2) to get a nested RAID 1+0 going. And these are only dual drive enclosures. In fact WD doesn't sell 4-bay DAS enclosures, it is only in their NAS pro line.
I still think they should have waited a couple years. I also think they should have waited a couple years on dropping the optical drive. I think Apple should wait to do something like that. I think you should only drop something when you can be more sure that it's not needed instead of just trying to be the first company to drop a particular thing and making customers use adapters for the first couple years.
Random-read/write activity can - absolutely - be loud. But most of the time it's so quiet I can't tell it's on. Compared to the Seagate 8TB Archive Drives I was using, it's night/day different.
Again, I can only speak for the 256MB cache version which apparently is quite new.
And I don't know why it's so dam hard to find 10Gb Ethernet NAS drives.
[doublepost=1503707592][/doublepost]
You can setup as a shared drive if you connect a computer to it.
I don't think 10Gb Ethernet is going to catch on for a while. At this point, you're lucky to find 1Gb Ethernet on a single-board computer.
[doublepost=1503709272][/doublepost]
Sure, but the part about them making SSDs bigger and more affordable has to come before they can just stop making hard drives altogether. Once the cost of SSDs is equal to that of hard drives of the same capacities and available in the same capacities, then companies can stop making hard drives. For now, we'll have to settle with having a midsize SSD (i.e. 512GB) and a big hard drive (2TB), which is what I have, as you can tell from my signature.