Similarly, JBOD (just-a-bunch-of-drives) seems redundant as it offers neither the resilience of mirroring nor the performance of RAID 0. The switch to the latest USB-C port is the biggest step forward. The old USB 3.0 Micro B connector was one of the worst connector designs of all time, and for me has been the cause of countless drive failures. It’s absence here can only be a good thing. With this configuration, the two disks inside the My Book Duo are treated as independent hard drives (each one has its own drive letter). With My Book Duo, you only need one USB cable to access both drives. WD notes that this is a USB 3.1 Gen 1 port, omitting to state that this is what USB 3.0 is called these days. That connection has plenty of bandwidth for the output of two conventional hard drives even if they’re configured in striped RAID 1, and any extra can be used by other devices connected via a USB 3.0 hub. Connection to your computer is via USB Type-C, and cables come for both this standard and to convert a conventional USB 3.0 port to the Type-C variety if you haven’t embraced that newish connector yet.

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.

Western Digital My Book Duo 12TB Snap Verdict

Having massive amounts of storage capacity attached to your system isn’t much use if it’s slow to access. 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.

Setting up the drive for your system couldn’t be easier, just install the software and follow the instructions. Currently, the largest desktop drive Seagate makes is a 20TB model. However, with Ironwolf drives with larger capacities now available, these are likely to be introduced to the Seagate Expansion series in the coming months. Striping is the default configuration. If you’d prefer a mirroring, it would be best to configure that using the provided software tools before loading any data – because any changes to the drive layout will delete all the data on there during the configuration process. Hardware encryption: there is none. However, the RAID is implemented via hardware in the MyBook Duo enclosure. The implications of this design are as follows:Connected through USB-C to a MacBook Pro 15-inch i9 with 32GB RAM, the drive produced results of 82.2MB/s Write speed and 88.5MB/s Read speed. I found that My Book Duo was generally quiet although it hummed a bit louder than My Book. The reading and writing sound wasn’t annoying. WHAT IS RAID AND HOW DO YOU USE IT?

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. One aspect of this design we wish was better is how noisy it can be. The fault-tolerant drives in these units are always doing something even when the drive isn’t in implicit use. And, by providing a solution where the drives are accessible, your storage solution can be repaired if a drive fails, or be upgraded to larger capacity storage when you need that.The other drive was an old My Book Duo connected through USB 2.0/3.0, so it has much slower transfer speeds and connects through my Kingston Nucleum hub. 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… c. If the MyBook Duo enclosure fails for any reason, a replacement enclosure will read the disks successfully. The data IS NOT LOST.”