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. Once the cable is connected and the drive is positioned, it can then be connected to your computer. It takes a few moments to mount, slightly longer than a single drive but still fast enough. As well as the core features of the drive through the WD Discoveries App, you have access to further applications, some of which need to be paid for. Chance of failure: lower. If the normal chance of failure of one drive is 1%, then the chance of failure with RAID-1 is 0.01%.

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. The USB 3.0/2.0 ports are designed for plugging in external devices and additional drives, which is handy. It also acts as a rather nifty doc for older devices that still utilise the USB 3.0/2.0 standard.Similarly, JBOD (just-a-bunch-of-drives) seems redundant as it offers neither the resilience of mirroring nor the performance of RAID 0.

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. RAID 1 sees content from one drive mirrored onto another. This means if a drive fails, then a new one can be popped in and the contents of the remaining drive will copy across to the new drive. 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.

Build Quality and Handling

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. 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 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. Unplug the router's power and wait 30 seconds. Reconnect power to the router and wait for it to reboot. Once this is complete, attempt to access the Dashboard again. On the 20TB model in RAID 0, striped mode, you have a capacity of about 18.1TB available to use from the outset.

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.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.

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… 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.One photographer friend of mine had a very large RAID drive that he set up at RAID-0 and, as you would expect, one drive failed and he lost an ENORMOUS amount of original shots and then spent many hundreds of dollars in recovery services. And even then, I think he was only able to recover part of his content. So please… avoid RAID-0 at all costs ! 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. The portly pachyderm in this room is how long it would take you to fill the drive from data existing on the host system. Assuming the AJA System Test results are roughly accurate, the transfer times are somewhat scary. 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.