WD rolls-out its ‘fastest’ external storage solution with Thunderbolt 2 interface

Western Digital Corp. this week introduced its all-new My Book Pro storage device with up to 12TB capacity, which is claimed to be the company’s highest-performing external storage solution based on hard disk drives. The new My Book Pro relies on Thunderbolt 2 or USB 3.0 interfaces.

The new WD My Book Pro storage device is powered by two WD Red or WD Black hard disk drives with 7200rpm spindle speed as well as a hardware RAID controller that supports hot-swapping of HDDs. The hard drives can work in RAID 0 (stripe) or RAID 1 (mirror) modes, thus offering either very high capacity and data transfer rates or exceptional fault tolerance. The new My Book Pro can offer 6TB, 8TB, 10TB and 12TB capacities.

Maximum data-rate supported by the new WD My Book Pro is 435MB/s. The storage solution uses USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt 2 interfaces with maximum 5Gb/s and 20Gb/s data-rates, respectively. In a bid to plug the device to modern PCs with USB 3.1 or Thunderbolt 3 connectors special adapters will be needed.

“The My Book Pro device has been designed from the ground up for the creative professional workflow,” said Sven Rathjen, vice president of marketing for WD's content solutions business. “We have been able to take the newest, highest capacity 6TB 7200rpm drives on the market and marry them with leading technologies to deliver a product you can leverage from the moment you connect it. It really is designed to perform under the most demanding environments.”

The My Book Pro storage device is covered by a three-year limited warranty and is available from the WD and select retailers and distributors. Manufacturer's suggested retail price (MSRP) will be $599 for the 6TB, $749 for the 8TB, $899 for the 10TB and $999 for the 12 TB.

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KitGuru Says: While 435MB/s is hardly a breakthrough performance by today’s standards, it is still pretty high data-rate for an external storage device. Higher performance solutions are available (for example, from WD Corp.’s G-Technology), but they are based on solid-state drives or multiple HDDs and naturally cost dramatically higher than the My Book Pro.

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