Western Digital My Book External Storage Systems – Now With Thunderbolt Ports!

Long time hard drive manufacturer Western Digital is putting out a new member of its well-known My Book line of external storage products – the My Book Thunderbolt Duo. Offered in 4TB (2x2TB) or 6TB (2x3TB) capacities, WD is targeting “creative pros, and today's need-it-now consumers” with the device. Meanwhile, those with more time or those with a knack for customizing everything they own may get a kick out of choosing between RAID 0 (combined capacity of both drives but less reliability), RAID 1 (capacity of one drive but more reliability), or JBOD (separate drives showing up in the operating system) modes to configure the drives in the casing.

Aside from those facts, the device brings compatibility with the new Thunderbolt interface to the table, potentially allowing much higher data transfer speeds than even USB 3.0 (10Gbps vs. 5Gbps) – provided the disk drives installed inside can keep up, that is. The device offers two of the ports on the back, allowing one to daisy-chain multiple Thunderbolt devices in a manner similar to the older Firewire standard. WD also hints that the user can swap out the pre-installed drives with larger ones in the future without cutting their three year warranty short.

Thunderbolt port on a MacBook Pro.While the Thunderbolt Duo is restricted to Mac users for now, PC manufacturers are slowly but surely beginning to integrate the interface into their designs, so not to worry; we will not be out of that loop for too much longer.

Anyway, WD is pricing the Thunderbolt Duo at $599.99 and $699.99 for 4TB and 6TB, respectively, and, if you're not willing to purchase one online, the drives should begin to fill up brick-and-mortar store shelves during the next couple of weeks.

UPDATE: The Thudnerbolt Duo is now available here at Amazon and other major retailers.

(Via The Tech Report; See WD's press release here.)