Welcome to my unboxing of a pretty cool product. This is the WD MyBook
Thunderbolt Duo. And what makes it duo
is the fact that Oh man. Okay, give me a
sec. And we got the plastic off, which is great. Okay, so what makes this a duo
hard drive is that it is a dual drive storage system. Okay, peak performance
for creative professionals. More on how to achieve that in just a moment. This
is a 4 TBTE total capacity unit, although it's available in a variety of
configurations. Uses Thunderbolt technology, although the cables sold
separately and works with Mac OSX Time Machine. And now that we have
Thunderbolt on the PC, it'll also work with whatever PC technologies you want
to use it with as well. So, it's not just just a Mac product, you guys. This
is very much a PC product, too. So,
don't hit that dislike button just
yet. All right, let's see what else Western Digital has to say for
themselves before we get too much further into this. So, we'll cover that
later. Threeyear warranty on this guy. Uh, there's the front in real size. Oh,
is that really actual size? Hold on. Let's see. Let's see how actual size
they've gotten it because it doesn't look quite right to me. Hold on. Hold
on. I do like it when on the outside of the box they do like an actual size
thing. Is it right? Let's see. See if
the height's right. Yeah. H It's almost
almost. It's very very close. So, that's what the unit looks like. Um on this
side, you see Okay, we'll show you all the ports on the back later. Uh user
blah blah blah blah blah. Okay. Yeah. Let's go. So, let's have a look at the
included accessories. Power adapter. Remember, no
Thunderbolt cable included. Those they're still really, really expensive.
So, it's up to the user to source a Thunderbolt cable. They show you how to plug in a Thunderbolt cable.
Thunderbolt's plug-andplay, so as long as your computer's set up for it, you
should be fine. Um, all
right. Why would you need one of
these? Very simple answer. And the
simple answer is that you need extremely
high-speed or very reliable and
high-speed external storage. So, the two drives in here can be configured either
as JBO or as JBO, which is just a bunch
of discs. So you'll have four four terabytes of nonbacked up and
nonacelerated storage or as RAID zero
for high performance. However, if one of
the drives inside were to fail, you would lose all of the data on it. So
you'd want to make sure you're also doing like a nightly backup or something
of your of your working drive because then you'd be using it as more like a
high performance external drive off of your laptop that you use for video or
rendering or photo editing or something like that. Okay? So you can use it for
high performance or the third option is you can configure it in RAID one which
will give you the performance of a single drive and the capacity of a
single drive. So you'll be down to two terabytes of capacity. However, you will
have complete redundancy between those two drives. So if one drive just fails
outright, you know, you drop the Thunderbolt Duo off your desk and one of
the drives doesn't work anymore. You're still okay. All your
data will be there. So JBO which gives you 4 gigs normal speed and if one drive
dies only the data on it is lost the other data is fine. So there's that.
Then there's RAID zero which is high performance 4 TB of capacity but
increased risk of data loss. And then there's RAID one which gives you single
drive performance and perfect data recovery in the event of a hardware
failure. So the unit itself is pretty pretty plain. You got your activity LED,
your WD logo. Pretty plain on this side. Don't worry, these aren't these marks
aren't real. These are just bits of packaging. Uh, pretty plain on this side
as well. On the back, you find the business end. This is where we've got
two Thunderbolt ports, so you can use it as a pass through if you have multiple
storage devices or if you have other Thunderbolt devices. Remember, there's
not much now, but more is coming. Or if you have a DisplayPort display that you
want to pass through to, that's why it has two for the daisy chaining
functionality of Thunderbolt. We've also got our power in. And here is a really,
really cool feature about this. Now, most external drives are not user
serviceable. This one, ah, there we go.
Is. So, all you got to do is pop the
top. And I'm learning this in real time. I have done no preparation on how to uh
how to swap out a drive. Simply open the
case and exchange the existing drive. No tools needed. Look at that. Okay. So,
there's a little ventilated uh piece there. So, actually, let's have a look
at the ventilation. So, you got vent holes at the bottom. Vent holes. No, no
vent holes at the back. So, they're relying on natural convection. Rubber
feet here to get keep it a little bit off the table. Cold air will come in
here, rise, and then go out of the top
of the unit. Great. Okay. So, how are
these uh Oh, okay. I think I get
it. And there we go. WD Caviar green
drives. It recommends to use WD green
power drives only. Um, that might be a
power restriction. It might be
um a quiet restriction. I mean, you don't want something sitting on your
desk to have really, really loud sleep times if you're using it all the time if it's sitting right next to your head.
For whatever reason, Western Digital recommends using green drives in here.
So, it's that simple. All you got to do is take out these screws. One, two. Take
this piece and put it on the screw when you put it into the new drive as well,
so that you'll actually be able to remove the new drive. and you could Oh,
that's that's cool. So, they're not locking you into this external storage
unit. They're actually giving you the option to go, oh, well, two two TB
drives isn't enough for me anymore, and now there are 6 TBTE, you know, green
drives. I can just buy a couple of those, throw them in there, and then I'm
ready to have a way, way bigger external
Thunderbolt storage solution because Thunderbolt is a standard that's going to matter for a long time now. and
you're getting a much better value with a product like this if you're going to be able to keep using it over an
extended period of time. So, that's actually very very big of them to go
ahead and do that. So, I'm just trying to uh get this back in at some point
here. You know what? I'm not going to stress about it too much, but I think I got it now. Let's have a Yeah, there's a
cat. Thank you, Slick, for contributing that to the uh to the video today. There
we go. I got it. So, let's see if there's anything else that we're missing here. Right. So, extra performance with
RAID zero. Raid one mirrored. Do more work in less time. Right. Why would you
want a Thunderbolt external drive? I mean, I covered this very briefly
before, but might as well. Yeah. Yeah,
it's fast. Okay, there's that. Thank you for that contribution. Thunderbolt is up to 10 Gbit per second, although until
hard drives get a fair bit faster. Even with RAID zero, we're not going to max
that out. We're going to need like Uber drives. Um, this is for professionals.
This is for notebook users. If your notebook has Thunderbolt, then you can
use this for huge mass storage on your desk that you can quickly and easily
plug in. So, you plug in one cable, boom, your desktop monitor's on, your uh
your storage is connected, and you don't have to sort of fumble around with a
bunch of different cables. So, there's that. And then usage scenario number two
is you need high performance, reliable external storage for a desktop PC that
you're using for professional use. A lot of the time, it can be more convenient
to use an external external storage device rather than throwing drives in
and out of your your actual computer tower all the time. I mean, if you have
a custom computer, it might not be as hard, but a lot of OEM computers, it's a
real hassle to fuss around with hard drives, and this is comparatively very,
very easy. So, thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the
Maybook Thunderbolt Duo. I will be doing a follow-up video on this one where we
have a look at performance over Thunderbolt with this particular device
in a few different configurations. So, stay tuned for that on the NCIXCOM
channel. And don't forget to subscribe to Lionus Tech Tips.