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Western Digital Announces Thunderbolt-Powered My Passport Pro RAID Drive

g4cube said:
Seagate Backup Plus Fast --> 2x 2TB drives inside, USB 3.0, and faster than this Thunderbolt drive; $269.99

http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Backup-Portable-External-STDA4000100/dp/B00HXAV0X6

Also bus powered.
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I don't see any evidence that it's faster than this WD version. Seagate's own page states 220 MB/s. Less than the theoretical limit of the WD drive in the article.

Not a great difference, I'll grant, but you really need either SSDs or more than a 2-drive array to saturate the Thunderbolt port.
 
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Macman45 said:
It's nice, but I'm always concerned by drives even SSD's that require power from a Logic Board....I know, It works, but my own theory is that it shortens the life of the PSU. If they release a version with an external PSU I'm in.
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When I was a mobile road warrior edit in the dirt kind of freelancer I used a 17" MBP that I ran to the ground. I daisied at least two FW800 G-Raids daily.

That machine lasted me 4 years with nary a problem.

Mr Dobey said:
I've been waiting for just this kind off super minimal/small device for a long time. Basically two 2.5" drives rubber banded together. Problem is now you could do two 1TB mSATA SSD drives stuck together with Thunderbolt 2 and get a much smaller package with the same performance.
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I haven't dug deep into the specs of the 2TB model, but I hope it's the 7.2k variant of drives. If it's 5.4k then I am going to be waiting for the SSD version or the for the ones with faster drives whichever one comes first.
 
Captive thunderbolt cable: FAIL.

What if it doesn't reach? I haven't seen any thunderbolt extension cables around, and as they're active cables that could be tricky. Neat cable storage solution - OK, captive cable: No.

No Thunderbolt daisychain port: FAIL.

As much use as a chocolate teapot for my 2011 MBP which only has 1 TB port, which is plugged into a display whenever I'm at the desk. Not so bad with the newer MBPs and iMacs that have a second TB socket but, even so, this is hogging a big chunk of your expansion capacity.
 
nzalog said:
I've been waiting for a mirrored raid in a portable drive for a while. Just wish it was USB 3 and OS agnostic. I transfer things between my mac and windows PC's a lot.
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You might be waiting for a long time.. or at least until the USB 3.0 specification changes.

USB 3.0's spec provides for 4.5 watts, maximum. When a single SATA-II drive can consume at least 3 watts, a paired RAID would necessarily require more power than the port could provide, hence the AC adapters.
 
having drives within an array that are not user replaceable is not a sound idea. you can certainly push capacity and speed but you'll double the failure rate. if you have redundancy in this case, you only have one extra-life so to speak should you experience a failure
 
Finally, a bus-powered portable RAID solution using Thunderbolt. I have been looking and looking for something like this.

BUT so many alternatives so this is not a clear winner for me.

I already have a Buffalo thunderbolt bus-powered drive with a 1TB SDD (which exceeds the speed performance specs of this drive).

Another alternative is using the CINERAID H212 which is a portable USB 3.0 bus powered RAID enclosure for 2.5" drives. Slightly slower but much cheaper even when you add drives, although 2TB 9.5mm drives are still hard to find bare. http://www.cineraid.com/products/home_h212.htm

The Seagate STDA4000100 mentioned here seem very attractive BUT I cannot find any documentation saying that it can be used in RAID 1 configuration. Also unclear if it uses hardware or software RAID or something else.
 
I'd like to see a 4-bay RAID 10 enclosure and a 5-bay RAID 6 enclosure with TB daisy chain option that doesn't break the bank. Also includes mSATA slot so I can buffer data faster. I know Drobo offers their 5D without drives but $699 is very expensive for some proprietary device.

I need faster storage than USB 3.
 
GSPice said:
Except,

c) Seagates gonna Seagate.
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LOL thank you for that. Hilarious.

l was actually considering getting that Seagate to carry around with me, and do weekly backups to a normal WD Drive. I would do backups no matter which brand, but especially with a Seagate. That price though! $170 cheaper for 4TB. I guess it all depends on what you're doing with it. I'd really like to get the WD. But for just being able to quickly access all my media files and related libraries on the go—and being USB which is more common—maybe the Seagate is the way to go for me with regular backups. I just need to decide soon as my 2TB drives (Hitatchi G-Drive backed up to WD Elements) are almost full, which slows them down considerably.
 
sputnikv said:
having drives within an array that are not user replaceable is not a sound idea. you can certainly push capacity and speed but you'll double the failure rate. if you have redundancy in this case, you only have one extra-life so to speak should you experience a failure
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This is a good point, I didn't even think about that. I am sure the case can be cracked open by some advanced users, but the device does not look like it was designed to be opened by the end user.
 
Here's how to price a Thunderbolt product:

1. Pick a market price for your product type.
2. Add $200.

I really wanna see a consumer-focused Thunderbolt product.
 
technopimp said:
That looks very big and clunky compared to the WD. But hard to say I guess.
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Actually the Seagate is 0.88 inches and this WD is 1.740 inches thick. The Seagate is 0.675lbs and the WD is 1.59lbs. Looked it up on their product pages. A big issue you have to deal with is it's a Seagate, which have been proven to be one of the least reliable drives according to information put out by data centers who have thousands of drives. It's also USB 3.0 which isn't as good for video professionals who need a consistent stream of data. I'm really torn. I wish that WD offered something like this in USB 3.0 for cheaper. I think 4TB for $299-329 USB 3.0 (still $30-60 more than the Seagate) would be reasonable as you're getting higher quality. Maybe not having a Thunderbolt board would also allow them to slim down the enclosure and weight?

Either way I would do regular backups on these drives as they are RAID 0—striping the data across both volumes. One goes, the whole array goes down. They're twice as prone to failure by design, but also twice as fast.
 
GSPice said:
You might be waiting for a long time.. or at least until the USB 3.0 specification changes.

USB 3.0's spec provides for 4.5 watts, maximum. When a single SATA-II drive can consume at least 3 watts, a paired RAID would necessarily require more power than the port could provide, hence the AC adapters.
Click to expand...

As other have mentioned, Seagate already has a two drive 4TB portable RAID 0 array on USB 3.0. They just need to make a RAID 1 version. http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Backup-Portable-External-STDA4000100/dp/B00HXAV0X6
 
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The speed

This, folks, is the top speed of that hard drive. In fact, with Thunderbolt, it's almost a crime to use anything but Flash drives.
 
nzalog said:
I've been waiting for a mirrored raid in a portable drive for a while. Just wish it was USB 3 and OS agnostic. I avoid having one drive I keep a lot of stuff on because drives fail. It's a fact of life, data needs to be protected somehow.
Click to expand...

sputnikv said:
having drives within an array that are not user replaceable is not a sound idea. you can certainly push capacity and speed but you'll double the failure rate. if you have redundancy in this case, you only have one extra-life so to speak should you experience a failure
Click to expand...

Here you go....
This clever drive enclosure lets you hot swap your RAIDed drives.

No TB version yet though.
 
Last edited:
Huh?

mojolicious said:
Didn't see that. Absolute deal-breaker.
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Put it last in the chain. What's the problem? Silly "deal-breaker" argument. The captive cable being short is also a silly reason to not buy it. It's a portable drive. It's meant to be used with a laptop on the go. I don't want a ridiculously long cable when I'm toting stuff around. They're a pain and usually get damaged easier.

For those saying USB 3.0 is better, well, that depends on the use case. For video editors (the target market for the product) USB anything doesn't fly unless you like dropped frames. You need a streamed protocol like FireWire or ThunderBolt. That's why FireWire has lasted as long as it has.

Prices will drop as the technology gets more pervasive. Some Windows machines are now beginning to have ThunderBolt and more devices are released all the time. Supply and demand. Economics 101 folks. I remember when USB first came out (1994ish on IBM PC 300 pizza boxes) and it didn't start taking off until Apple put it in the iMac and all device makers started producing peripherals for it. Devices with USB got cheaper over a period of years as the tech spread. Patience grasshoppers. Don't poo-poo a product because you can't afford it. Most likely you don't really need it if that's the case.
 
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theluggage said:
No Thunderbolt daisychain port: FAIL.

As much use as a chocolate teapot for my 2011 MBP which only has 1 TB port, which is plugged into a display whenever I'm at the desk. Not so bad with the newer MBPs and iMacs that have a second TB socket but, even so, this is hogging a big chunk of your expansion capacity.
Click to expand...
mojolicious said:
Didn't see that. Absolute deal-breaker
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dagger01 said:
Put it last in the chain. What's the problem? Silly "deal-breaker" argument.
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For both theluggage and me our chains begin at our computers and end at our monitors. Daisychained technology is pretty useless with single port devices.

Not sure I ever saw an external SCSI device with just a single connector.
 
Looks good. Too bad they skimped on a 2nd Thunderbolt port to allow for passthrough :( That'll limit adoption for a lot of people who don't have a Thunderbolt port to spare.
 
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