Western Digital Updates My Book Duo Desktop Storage - Up to 20 TB

[Raevenlord]

For some users, having three HDDs of differing capacities in their system isn't the right solution for achieving the storage space they need. Others don't want to have their files uploaded to the cloud, where security and access times to their files may become hindrances. Some people just like to have all their files offline, in a (somewhat) portable medium that achieves up to 360 MB/s sequential read speeds. Enter Western Digital's updated My Book Duo external desktop storage.

RAID-optimized WD Red hard drives (formatted NTFS out of the box) enable those read speeds, and capacities of 4 TB, 6 TB, 8 TB, 12 TB, 16 TB and 20 TB are available. Connectivity-wise, the My Book duo offers USB Type-C and Type-A, while security isn't left out the door, with built-in password protection and 256-bit AES hardware encryption with WD Security software. The unit measures 7.09 x 6.3 x 3.94 inches and weighs between 5.05 to 5.25 pounds depending on drive capacity. The My Book Duo is available now, with pricing at $259.99 for the 4 TB unit, and a maximum of $799.99 for the 20 TB model, all with a three-year warranty.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[P4-630]

Common, why so expensive??? Any external SSDs will smoke this both in speed and size.

But wait... How much do 20x1 TB SSD's cost?

 

[Octavean]

Well the case new and I'm not sure there was a 20TB option before this one.

I recently bought a 16TB My Book Duo for something like ~$460 USD which I thought was a decent price at the time. Inside were two WD Red 8TB drives which I moved to a Mediasonic 8 bay Probox RAID enclosure.

I also recently bought two WD Easystore 8TB USB drives for ~$159 and they each had a WD Red 8TB drive in them. Those two were removed and installed in the Mediasonic 8 bay Probox RAID enclosure for backup purposes on an 8 bay Synology DS1815+ NAS loaded with 8x 8TB WD Red drives.

The thing about the old style WD My Book Duo was that the drives came with a warranty and they were easy to remove from the factory enclosure due to being designed to be user replaceable. This new WD My Book Due doesn't look like it has the same design goals in mind but its hard to tell.

Also note that with the previous version hardware encryption was compulsory and as such should anything go wrong with the enclosure you would be left with encrypted data and no way to access it. Installing the HDD's in an identical WD MyBook Duo enclosure wouldn't help because the encryption was tied to the specific enclosure (enclosures logic board).

So while it may be cheaper to buy the MyBook Duo rather then stand alone WD Red drives it could cause problems for you if you use the factory enclosure.