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. 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. 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%. 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.

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. The new My Book Duo has diverged in one major way from the previous designs; the rather lame ‘Book’ analogy has finally been terminated.

Features

Use the setup software, if it has not been attempted already. The software can be found in the Online Learning Center. Given the tools that other WD products come with, the selection of software that is included with the 44TB Duo is underwhelming. Connection speeds for both read and write are good and more than fast enough for you to edit 1080p video directly from the drive. In this test, I’m looking at the drive from the perspective of a storage device for photographers and videographers. To this end, I have selected to use the drive as a RAID 1. This means that the storage is optimised for safety, so if one drive fails my content will still be safe on the other drive.

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. If you look carefully, above the two USB 3.0/2.0 ports you’ll see a thin power button. This is used when you need to swap out drives.

The reality is that curating 22TB or 44TB of data on the Duo is a significant exercise. Transferring it on and off can’t be done at a whim, and the thought of losing that much data through hardware failure is terrifying. 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. 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. 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).

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. Here are the speeds of the My Book Duo in RAID-0. The top two are sequential, while the bottom two are random. WD My Book Duo speed test in RAID-0 configuration 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… As I’ve already said, it also means I’ll have 6TB of capacity rather than the maximum of 12TB that I could have had if this drive had been configured as RAID 0. RAID 1 also offers slower transfer speed than when compared with RAID 0, so this test will show the results from a real-world test of the drive being used as storage solution for photographers and videographers. This means that the disks are trapped inside the case and cannot be connected solo somewhere external or inside a PC.I tested the speed of RAID-1 on My Book Duo and found that it was almost half as slow when reading sequential data, although the write speed was about the same. The increase in speed appeared to be from random read. My Book Duo RAID-1 speed To do this I simply ejected the drive, powered down and removed one of the drives. I then popped in a new drive and connected theMy Book Duo.