WD Introduces 8TB My Book Duo, 4TB My Book 3.0 External Drives

Western Digital has announced two new external hard drive units for HD video editors, professional photographers and the like. These are the 8TB (8000GB) My Book Thunderbolt Duo and the 4TB (4000GB) My Book 3.0. Both, according to StorageReview, make use of Hitachi's 4TB disk technology rather than the in-house developed WD Caviar Greens that usually inhabit the My Book series, though they didn't explain how they came to know that.

The 8TB Thunderbolt Duo boasts dual Thunderbolt interface ports and contains two of the aforementioned 4TB Hitachi drives working in tandem. One can configure the drives in a RAID0 array for 8TB combined capacity, in a RAID1 array for 4TB of storage but higher reliability, and in JBOD mode to access the drives individually. The Duo is primarily marketed toward Mac users, though Thunderbolt-enabled PC users can surely reformat the device for use. In addition, Thunderbolt daisy-chaining is supported, allowing one to string a bunch of these with peripherals like HD monitors, all through a single Thunderbolt port on the computer.

Meanwhile, the tamer My Book 3.0 4TB unit is a single-drive design that trades the Thunderbolt capability for USB 3.0, which is backwards-compatible with computers sporting only USB 2.0 ports. WD assures out-of-box compatibility with the upcoming Windows 8 operating system and includes its SmartWare software suite, capable of fully-automatic data backups.

Both of these enclosures are slowly coming available to retailers, with the My Book 4TB set for $249.99 and the 8TB Thunderbolt Duo set for a whopping $849.99.