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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. If you have the Duo on the desk, the continuous rumbles and clunks can soon become annoying. WD need to consider that they are desktop devices and, therefore, need soundproofing added to make them less intrusive in quiet working environments. Removing one of the drives, as if it were damaged, and replacing it with a blank proved easy enough. Once the blank drive was installed, the RAID could be rebuilt ensuring the content remains duplicated. At all times, the content remained accessible. 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.
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. 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. When the drive mounted, WD Discovery alerts that the RAID needs to be rebuilt I followed the one-step instructions and left the Duo to it.Chance of failure: higher. If the normal chance of failure of one drive is 1%, then the chance of failure with RAID-0 is almost double at 1.99%. Of these, the WD Drive utilities are the most vital, as they allow you to change the RAID configuration of the Duo. Hopefully, this will be resolved in the coming months, but for now, online retail is the only source for this or any WD-branded products. Besides expandability, another advantage of My Book Duo over a single external hard drive is that it can be reconfigured for better reliability, or higher speed using RAID (see below).
As I’ll be looking at the My Book Duo as a photo and video storage solution I aim to set the RAID to RAID 1. The drive arrives as RAID 0 and preformatted as NTFS. As a comparison, the My Passport SSD connected through USB-C reaches speeds of 188MB/s Write and 389MB/s Read.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 As default, the drive arrives formatted as NTFS which is a PC file system. As a Mac user, I’ll need to reformat as a Mac Format, either JHFS+ or APFS. I’ve selected JHFS+ for maximum compatibility. Use the setup software, if it has not been attempted already. The software can be found in the Online Learning Center. Having massive amounts of storage capacity attached to your system isn’t much use if it’s slow to access. Connection speeds for both read and write are good and more than fast enough for you to edit 1080p video directly from the drive.
Meanwhile, I was somewhat concerned about reliability too. Is hard drive failure real? Yes it has happened to me, a couple of years ago, on a Sandisk SSD drive that I was using as my C: drive on one of my PCs. One day, my PC couldn’t load it and it took a reboot to be able to read it. The same thing happened the next day. The third day it just stopped loading altogether. And just this week in one of the Facebook groups for 360 cameras, someone posted that their hard drive failed. So it is uncommon, but it happens. As a dual drive, the hardware features two internal hard drives that, by means of a hardware RAID, can be configured to maximise capacity and speed (RAID 0) or safety (RAID 1). Looking at the specifications, the interface to the host system is only USB 3.2 Gen 1, or 5Gb/s, but that’s still more than enough transfer speed for the combined efforts of two 22TB drives in RAID 0. 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.
Western Digital goes big on personal storage
If the network drive's name has been changed, please attempt to use the drive's name instead of mybooklive. For example, use http://drivename/ on a PC, or http://drivename.local/ on a Mac.
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