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. RAID 0, or stripe, maximises the storage so will utilise both drives and give you a single storage drive with a 12TB capacity. Striping the drive will also give you the fastest read and write times. The My Book Duo is far more than just a simple external drive. It has a wealth of additional features that will appeal to photographers and videographers. Features

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 When the drive mounted, WD Discovery alerts that the RAID needs to be rebuilt I followed the one-step instructions and left the Duo to it. b. The RAID implementation is the same from enclosure to enclosure. Therefore, a drive created in one MyBook Duo enclosure CAN be installed into another MyBook Duo enclosure and READ SUCCESSFULLY. (As I have two MyBook Duo’s, I have physically tested this.) I found that My Book Duo was generally quiet although it hummed a bit louder than My Book. The reading and writing sound wasn’t annoying. WHAT IS RAID AND HOW DO YOU USE IT? 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.I do a lot of photo editing and video editing, and I couldn’t get a clear answer on this. At first I tried RAID-0, and usually it seemed faster, although sometimes it was slower. I found that when I was extracting zip files from within the My Book Duo in RAID-0, it was extremely slow. Whereas on my usual external drive, expanding that same zip file took only a second or two, it would take a minute or longer on the My Book Duo. 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.

Are you looking for more storage for your 360 photos and videos? Here’s a hands-on review of WD My Book Duo, a fast, expandable external hard drive. However, it has a potential dealbreaker – hardware encryption (see below). I’ll also discuss the basics of RAID. Given the tools that other WD products come with, the selection of software that is included with the 44TB Duo is underwhelming. 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. 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. 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.

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. Having massive amounts of storage capacity attached to your system isn’t much use if it’s slow to access.

Hardware encryption: there is none. However, the RAID is implemented via hardware in the MyBook Duo enclosure. The implications of this design are as follows: There is also the option which is set-up through the software to enable encryption. This is 256-bit AES hardware encryption. While it’s still a ‘My Book’ product, the new hardware looks much more like what it truly is; a tiny desktop server.

WHICH RAID SHOULD YOU USE?

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. 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. The WD My Book Duo (2017 edition) is certainly a class act that combines new styling with excellent performance and potentially massive capacities. In my office, I have a 12TB Duo (dual 6TB drives), and from the outside, these units look the same, even down to the finest details.

Chance of failure: higher. If the normal chance of failure of one drive is 1%, then the chance of failure with RAID-0 is almost double at 1.99%. Connected through USB-C to a MacBook Pro 15-inch i9 with 32GB RAM, the drive produced results of 82.2MB/s Write speed and 88.5MB/s Read speed. 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%.

This Duo needs to go on a diet

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…