Western Digital’s new My Book VelociRaptor Duo is a new 2TB Thunderbolt drive that sports two 1TB 10,000 RPM VelociRaptor drives. It includes two Thunderbolt ports for connecting multiple Thunderbolt devices, including daisy-chaining additional My Book VelociRaptor drives for insane RAID 0 speeds.
WD will be including a Thunderbolt cable with each of these new units. This was something that a lot of people griped about when Thunderbolt drives first started trickling into the market and the only cable available was the $50 one from Apple.
In the basic RAID 0 configuration with just one My Book VelociRaptor Duo unit, you get write speeds of 380MB/s and read speeds up to 400MB/s, which is significantly faster than I got with the My Book Thunderbolt Duo that I tested at 240MB/s.
If you daisy-chain two My Book VelociRaptor Duo units together in RAID 0, write speeds go up to 760MB/s and reads speeds hit 800MB/s. What’s more, if you already have some of the My Book Thunderbolt Duo units, you can daisy-chain these along with the new My Book VelociRaptor Duo in RAID 0 and take advantage of the speed benefits across the board.
The My Book VelociRaptor Duo can also be configured in RAID 1 or JBOD.
The My Book VelociRaptor Duo ain’t cheap at $900 retail, but it’s not likes the unit is a typical consumer unit either. This drive is for serious post-production workflows where data throughput is huge and/or transfer times are critical. And when you compare the price, storage capacity and performance to SSD drives, the My Book VelociRaptor Duo is hands-down a better deal for a desktop unit.
The My Book VelociRaptor Duo is currently available on WD’s website and should be available at B&H Photo soon.
If you are looking for something a little more portable, WD also unveiled its new My Passoport for Mac with USB 3 for the new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models that feature USB 3 ports.
[…] the new WD My Book VelociRaptor Duo Thunderbolt unit, WD is also updating the My Passport […]