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External hard drives have come along way in a short time, and while the drives themselves have changed little, the technology and software around them have advanced at speed. This is the default mode of My Book Duo. With RAID-0, each file is split between two drives. As with RAID-1, your drive can read from both drives at the same time, so the reading speed is theoretically almost double (for sequential reading). Meanwhile, the storage capacity is the same as normal. If you have two 8TB drives, then when using them in RAID-0, you will have a single 16TB drive with one drive letter. The disadvantage of RAID-0 is that if either or both of the drives fail, you will lose the data in both drives, therefore the chance of failure is almost double. In use, transfer speeds are pretty decent, by no means SSD speeds but perfectly suitable for the intended use and of course with the benefit of the huge capacity. If you need to get to the two drives, then the top of the box can be removed. It’s just push fit, and with a flat head screwdriver, it’s easy enough to pop off the top. Because I was ambivalent about the performance gains, I decided to just use JBOD as a decent compromise of speed, safety, and storage capacity (minimax strategy). If I want speed, I’ll use an external SSD for my working files. MY BOOK DUO HARDWARE ENCRYPTION ISSUE
Once it appears, it will show as with any other hard drive that you plug into your system. But, before you get started, it needs to be configured for your use and system. The My Book Duo can be used with either Mac or PC systems but it needs to be formatted in the correct file system for that system before use. A high price is expected at launch for the new flagship Duo, but once some direct competitor products are available, the price is likely to go down.
WHICH RAID SHOULD YOU USE?
The beauty of the Duo is that you can easily remove the top and replace the drives if required, assuming you’ve removed all the data previously and powered down the drives. Therefore, that plan that had you securing 22TB or 44TB of local data each night on this external drive is impractical from the outset unless the changes are minor or incremental. There is also the option which is set-up through the software to enable encryption. This is 256-bit AES hardware encryption.
Of these, the WD Drive utilities are the most vital, as they allow you to change the RAID configuration of the Duo.The drive looks like any other external drive but inside features two hard drives and hardware RAID. These two drives can be configured to either appear as one large 12TB drive or a 6TB mirror. The latest WD Duo is a complete redesign from the previous generation which had existed for a few years. While it’s still a ‘My Book’ product, the new hardware looks much more like what it truly is; a tiny desktop server.
That said, compared to SATA SSD, the drives in the Duo are painfully slow even if you configure them in the optimal performance arrangement, striped, aka RAID 0. A little research reveals that the larger PSU comes with Duo’s of 16TB or bigger, and that infers it might be a bad plan to get a 12TB or smaller Duo and put 22TB mechanisms in it. For a drive of this type, those speeds are more than sufficient for all image manipulation from files directly from disk and most types of full HD video editing, again direct from disk.
Western Digital My Book Duo 12TB Snap Verdict
Further testing with the AJA system test revealed that when confronted with a large 64GB file, performance in mirror mode reduced to 129MB/s reads and 162MB/s writes, and it maintained that speed for the entire file transfer. RAID 0, or stripe, maximises the storage so will utilise both drives and give you a single storage drive with a 12TB capacity. Striping the drive will also give you the fastest read and write times. On the 20TB model in RAID 0, striped mode, you have a capacity of about 18.1TB available to use from the outset. I do a lot of photo editing and video editing, and I couldn’t get a clear answer on this. At first I tried RAID-0, and usually it seemed faster, although sometimes it was slower. I found that when I was extracting zip files from within the My Book Duo in RAID-0, it was extremely slow. Whereas on my usual external drive, expanding that same zip file took only a second or two, it would take a minute or longer on the My Book Duo. The new My Book Duo has diverged in one major way from the previous designs; the rather lame ‘Book’ analogy has finally been terminated.
A small plastic tool is included for you to pop the top of the unit off and access the drives inside for replacement. The drives are mounted on tool-less trays that slide out easily. It’s tempting that based purely on appearances, the 44TB Duo is identical to the old 12TB model, although other than the drives, we did notice one significant difference. The danger now is that the controller of the MyBook Duo case could also die. Both disks are then still intact, but can probably no longer be read anywhere… We’d strongly recommend anyone buying this unit to reconfigure it to RAID 1 (Mirror) mode even if that waves aloha to 22TB of space. Having this volume of data on a device, assuming that neither drive will ever die, is more optimistic than is healthy for most people.
Features
In RAID 1, mirror mode, using CrystalDiskMark 8.04. the drive read at just 118.83 MB/s and wrote at 178.86MB/s, showing that some caching was helping the write performance. Over RAID 0, those numbers increased to 317.43MB/s reads and 281.99MB/s writes. A slightly odd result, but the cap of around 282MB/s writing is only 58% better with both drives over one, and you double the chance of data loss for that extra speed and twice the capacity. Alongside the two drives is the RAID hardware, this comes pre-configured as RAID 0 which optimises speed and capacity for the drive. If after those steps were unable to provide access to the Dashboard, there are a few things that can be attempted: Where this device truly shines is in the terrific performance of the 10TB WD RED drives that give this unit more zip than physical hard drives normally deliver.
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