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Storage needs have drastically increased over the last ten years as more people switch to digital content and file sizes increase. As a result, larger hard drives are needed, whether it be for work-related projects, personal use or a mix of the two. With that in mind, Western Digital has announced today that it is launching a new 20TB version of its My Book Duo storage system, the highest capacity it has made.
The new 20TB My Book Duo comes ready for RAID use and packs two USB 3.0 ports. To help protect your files and keep everything secure, 256-bit AES hardware encryption can be used and of course, you will have plenty of storage for pretty much everything.
The My Book Duo isn’t exactly a small external drive, it is quite tall and bulky, so you will need to keep it sitting on your desk. Still, if you need to take it somewhere, it is still small enough to fit into a bag alongside a laptop.
Given that this is a 20TB drive, performance will depend on a couple of factors. If you are running the My Book Duo in RAID-0 mode over a USB Type-C cable, you will get sequential read speeds of up to 360MB/s. There is also a RAID-1 mode that will mirror data on the two WD-Red drives inside. This gives you redundancy, so if one drive fails or corrupts, then you will still have that data backed up and ready to go on the second drive. The only downside to this is you would only be able to use half the available HDD space. If one or both drives die, there is a three year warranty in place should any problems arise.
Given the amount of storage this thing offers, it isn’t cheap by any stretch. In fact, the regular price for the 20TB My Book Duo is $849.99. There are other versions though, including 16TB for $629.99, 12TB for $439.99, 8TB for $349.99, 6TB for $299.99 and finally, 4TB for $279.99.
KitGuru Says: Lately I have found myself getting pretty close to filling up my 4TB storage drive, so I’ve been looking in to getting something a bit bigger. How much storage space do you currently have available to you?
way too much money
Up197s
OTOH, it’s really quite cheap. A pair of 8TB OEM WD Reds (lower warranty than the retail units) cost me £424 in Feb when they were on special offer. Factor in the price of an enclosure, and it’s more than comparable to the £549 WD want for the 16TB version.