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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. 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. Although it optimises the drive, it’s not a great solution for secure storage as I need something that is as robust as possible. 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. Of these, the WD Drive utilities are the most vital, as they allow you to change the RAID configuration of the Duo.
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. Incidentally, you can also set the unit to JBOD (which stands for ‘just a bunch of drives’), where each drive becomes a single volume/logical drive. We’re not sure why you might want to go this route, as it offers no redundancy against drive failure (like mirroring) or performance benefits (striping). But anyway, the option is there.If after those steps were unable to provide access to the Dashboard, there are a few things that can be attempted: 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. It’s tempting that based purely on appearances, the 44TB Duo is identical to the old 12TB model, although other than the drives, we did notice one significant difference.
Setting up the drive for your system couldn’t be easier, just install the software and follow the instructions.a. The proprietary nature of the hardware RAID implementation means that the individual disk drives CANNOT be read outside of the MyBook Duo enclosure. I believe this is not unique to the MyBook Duo as many other RAID enclosures have the same characteristics.
videos and 360 photos can take up a lot of space, especially if you use high quality formats such as Prores or TIFF. I’ve almost filled up two 8TB hard drives and was looking for an external hard drive and chose the WD My Book Duo is an external hard drive with two bays that can each accommodate standard 3.5-inch hard drives. 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 a comparison, the My Passport SSD connected through USB-C reaches speeds of 188MB/s Write and 389MB/s Read. Alongside the two drives is the RAID hardware, this comes pre-configured as RAID 0 which optimises speed and capacity for the drive.It’s also worth considering that even if built incrementally, returning all that data to the host system if it suffered a failure could take days. 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 !
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