Western Digital debuts My Book Duo with up to 20TB of external storage
Western Digital this week launched the My Book Duo, an external RAID storage system that comes with up to 20 terabytes of storage, and as well as a USB-C port simplifying connections with recent Macs.
The Duo relies on WD's Red network-attached storage drives, with reads up to 360 megabytes per second and additional support for 256-bit AES hardware encryption. Capacity options include 4, 6, 8, 12, 16, or 20 terabytes.
Though equipped with USB-C, bundled cables let the unit work with USB 2.0 and 3.0 computers as well. Two USB-A ports are actually meant for connecting accessories like card readers, USB drives, keyboards, and mice -- WD notes that owners can in fact sync and charge a phone.
By default the Duo is NTFS-formatted for Windows systems, but it can be reformatted for use with Macs.
Prices for the My Book Duo start at $259.99 for 4 terabytes and range up to $849.99 for 20 terabytes. B&H is taking orders for all storage capacities with free expedited shipping and no tax collected outside NY and NJ. Amazon is also accepting backorders.
The Duo relies on WD's Red network-attached storage drives, with reads up to 360 megabytes per second and additional support for 256-bit AES hardware encryption. Capacity options include 4, 6, 8, 12, 16, or 20 terabytes.
Though equipped with USB-C, bundled cables let the unit work with USB 2.0 and 3.0 computers as well. Two USB-A ports are actually meant for connecting accessories like card readers, USB drives, keyboards, and mice -- WD notes that owners can in fact sync and charge a phone.
By default the Duo is NTFS-formatted for Windows systems, but it can be reformatted for use with Macs.
Prices for the My Book Duo start at $259.99 for 4 terabytes and range up to $849.99 for 20 terabytes. B&H is taking orders for all storage capacities with free expedited shipping and no tax collected outside NY and NJ. Amazon is also accepting backorders.
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Skeptical? The human genome is 3 billion base pairs of DNA. Even with only 20-fold redundancy (needed for assembly) that's 60 gigabases, which is 60 Gbyte of ascii data. Now think about the companies offering full- genome sequencing to the public, and the many people willing to pay a few thousand bucks each for the service.
Now think of all the plant, animal, and microbial research being done in the world, and understand that many of these organisms are having their DNA being sequenced by someone. And not just once, but multiple instances of each species.... Data storage is a major issue. PS: the last Mac I bought is outfitted with 128 GB of RAM....
And now an AAC-encoded long song can be 20MB all by itself. A single raw file out of a 36MP DSLR can be 48MB and then another 15MB for the JPG. And then you Photoshop the file, but want to keep the originals, so that's another TIFF, which can be very large or another JPG which is another 15MB. So you have at least 66MB for a single image and now multiply that by however many images one might shoot in a year. It adds up fast.
MP4 1080p movies of about 10-20 minutes can be almost 3GB each. And remember, one might store the original footage, the final edited footage and the intermediate files created by the video editing application. As people move to 4K and potentially in years forward to 8K, the storage requirements are going to be enormous.
I'm very good at getting rid of unnecessary files and clearing email boxes out, etc., and my Mac is almost at a Terabyte already. Sure, I still see 20TB as excessive, but if I was doing video every day as a pro it wouldn't be. If I bought this drive, I'd probably buy 4TB, but every time I've made a decision like that thinking it would be enough, I've always regretted it afterwards because it was never enough.
It was cheaper for me (and it worked out the same) to harvest the drive from the case and drop it into an external enclosure.
and 12TB drives have been out for a few months, though they’re still pretty expensive, and hard to get out of an enterprise sale volume purchase, but that will change shortly, as bigger drives come out later this year, or early next year.
I checked. This does come with raid 0/1 support.
Here it is
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/243530-seagate-plans-16tb-drives-2018-20tb-2020 ;
Storage and Networking speeds are in alignment with the the ideal that enthusiasts will eschew streaming for media servers at home that have high quality versions of their content available locally. I'm already hitting Comcast's bandwidth cap pretty regularly.
This is the whole HDD Manufactures calling a byte 1000, and Ram company's calling a byte 1024. Windows shows things at 1024. Does the Mac? When you get up into such large HDD sizes, that small difference add's up. Then you lose a little more space to formatting.
My NAS is maxed out in drives, but I can go to larger HDD's. Just popping in 6TB HDD, I could jump my space to over 32TB in Raid5. If I went with the 10TB drives they are using, I could have 54.5TB of space.
You should see my DVD, HD DVD and Blu-Ray collection. I have a lot of movies. Blu-Ray's really take up a lot of space fast. But it's nice ripping all my movies and putting them on my NAS and having PLEX serve them all up in any room in my house or away from my house. I can then throw the discs into my large binders as a last resort backup. Takes up a whole lot less space. Going 4K, which I haven't done yet, just makes it all that much worse.
Remember the Disc changers in the past here it would hold like 100 Discs. You thought WOW. I'm so far past that. Using PLEX, I get all the info shown to me similar to Netflix. I have different users accounts. No more hunting around for a disc. So a lot of storage space is great. A raid is not a backup. It allows easy access to a large amount of Data at once. it should still be backed up! So really, if you want one of these 20TB WD units to put your Data on, you might as well buy 2 of them. One for your Data and one for the backup!
The last thing I would worry about is MB vs MIB. When drives were small, it mattered that you knew. But it’s just the opposite of what you’re saying here, the larger they get, the less it matters.
since we must keep at least 10% of a drive empty, another GB, or so that we know about, one way or the other on a multiple TB drive doesn’t mean anything. On an SSD, it’s worse, one should leave at the very least 15% open, and preferably 20%, particularly if that drive is being written to and files erased on a regular basis. So with a 1TB drive, a GB is just 0.1% of capacity, approximately, hardly noticeable. It’s really just semantics.
but whether you use MB or MIB, the actual capacity is the same, and only desperate techies who are trying to prove their geek credentials argue the point.
Since these are RAID0 out of the box, if you need redundancy, you'll lose half of the advertised storage amount.