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Setting up the drive for your system couldn’t be easier, just install the software and follow the instructions. 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. If you need to get to the two drives, then the top of the box can be removed. It’s just push fit, and with a flat head screwdriver, it’s easy enough to pop off the top. The new My Book Duo has diverged in one major way from the previous designs; the rather lame ‘Book’ analogy has finally been terminated.
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’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.The chance of failure with JBOD is the same as individual disks. Some say that you should consider the failure rate of both disks. But the two disks are independent, and using them in a JBOD configuration is no different than having two external drives instead of one. If the chance of losing a file from hard drive failure is 1%, then it is still 1% when using JBOD. 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. In RAID 1, mirror mode, using CrystalDiskMark 8.04. the drive read at just 118.83 MB/s and wrote at 178.86MB/s, showing that some caching was helping the write performance. Over RAID 0, those numbers increased to 317.43MB/s reads and 281.99MB/s writes. A slightly odd result, but the cap of around 282MB/s writing is only 58% better with both drives over one, and you double the chance of data loss for that extra speed and twice the capacity. RAID 1 mirrors the content from each drive. This means that when you copy a file onto the drive, it will be duplicated across to the other drive. Although there are two 6TB drives giving a total capacity of 12TB, by using RAID 1 I’ll only have access to 6TB of total storage.
That said, compared to SATA SSD, the drives in the Duo are painfully slow even if you configure them in the optimal performance arrangement, striped, aka RAID 0. 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. 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. 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.
WHAT IS RAID AND HOW DO YOU USE IT?
Having massive amounts of storage capacity attached to your system isn’t much use if it’s slow to access. Having this much capacity sounds like a dream, especially for those using a 4TB external drive or a smaller Duo model. But the dream of having this much space is also, oddly, something of a nightmare. 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. 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. For those who don’t care about read and write speeds and have two or three copies of everything they put on them, these are useful and cost-effective devices. But for anyone with an important data set to secure and manage, they’re probably the wrong way to go.
My Book Duo connects to your PC or Mac via USB Type C and supports USB 3.1. It includes USB Type C to Type C, and a USB Type C to Type A cables. The drive also has two USB 3.0 pass-through ports for accessories or other drives. WD My Book Duo has two pass through USB 3 ports This means that the disks are trapped inside the case and cannot be connected solo somewhere external or inside a PC.That’s realistically the only way to use one of these, feeding it data daily that builds up to represent a much larger capacity.
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