Western Digital Intros My Book Thunderbolt Duo Drive
Western Digital has introduced an external drive using Thunderbolt connectivity.
Macworld/iWorld 2012 is now underway, and Western Digital has decided to use the Apple event to reveal its new My Book Thunderbolt Duo dual-drive storage system. As the name indicates, the external drive connects via the 10 Gbps Thunderbolt port and supports two 3.5-inch hard drives in a RAID 0 striped array.
"Thunderbolt technology is capable of producing up to 10 Gbps per second of throughput on each of two channels in both directions," WD said on Thursday. "Users can experience very fast read/write speeds especially during applications such as video editing, 3D rendering, and other intense graphics projects. To put Thunderbolt's speed into perspective, HD media creators will be able to transfer a standard size full-length HD movie in less than 30 seconds, or backup an entire year of continuous music (approx. 8,600 hours of music) in roughly 10 minutes."
Current hard drive technology will be the bottleneck in Thunderbolt's performance, as a demonstration shown at Macworld revealed a 6 TB Thunderbolt Duo to only have peak transfer speeds of 2 Gbps (250 MBps). Still, that's faster than USB 3.0 even in its present state, and allows users to shuttle a full HD movie back and forth in thirty seconds each way.
Little else is known about the My Book Thunderbolt Duo for now although it will arrive in 4 TB and 6 TB capacities whenever it hits the market. Pricing is also unknown, so stay tuned. Naturally Mac owners will have access to the product first until Windows-based PCs with Thunderbolt begin to emerge later this year.

And if PCs don't pick up Thunderbolt, then it will go the way of Firewire 800.
At least you could have found them on Sony desktops RIP.
Yes, that is how RAID 0 works. However, I think the intended usage for this is to quickly copy files from one computer to another. One situation where this would be useful is video editor who has to work both from home and the office.
Even slow drives move at 120MB/s these days, and with SSD and RAID available we need something faster than 1000/t ethernet, and USB3 which is already too slow for many applications (just like USB2 was when it came out). Besides, as I understand it, thunderbolt is a daisy-chain style interface (like firewire use to be back in the day), which means that all devices share a common pool of bandwidth. The cool thing about thunderbolt is that it (supposedly) can run multiple simultaneous protocols over the same wire. Meaning you can daisy chain your monitor, external HDDs, network to another PC/mac, or even use adapters to plug in USB, or firewire devices in, and each device will speak in it's original language of SATA, HDMI, etc. The idea is that it would be the 'last' and single interconnect for every device from your monitor to your cell phone. If you had that many devices connected all at once it would quickly become understandable that you need massive amounts of bandwidth.
Practically speaking it does monitors, HDDs, and some audio protocols (though you would need a thunderbolt amp/receiver/decoder to make that useful, and I dont think they are out yet), with others to come in later revisions. It was also supposed to be over fiber optic cable (thus the name Lightpeak originally), but that was thrown under the bus with all the other disappointments we have had with the interface so far. Still a good idea, just far short of what we were promised.
It all depends on the royalty fees and the fact that it is already pointed to the PC world.
Even a top end raided SSD would only need eSATA or USB3, there is no need for this to be used on an external drive until read speeds get even slightly closer.
Never gonna happen.......
Awesome explanation. Much appreciated
smell like troll
Are you still using an IDE HDD as master with a dvd burner as slave, and using a really old ribbon cable not even rated at Ultra ATA/100 speeds?
Are you using a SATA green drive at 5400rpm on a SATA I/II controller with a SATA I cable, and it happens to be a nVidia chipset?
Are you using an IDE laptop HDD?
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USB3 says 600MB/s as its speed but how often does that actually happen? Isn't the bandwidth shared between all of the USB3 connectors that all tie into a controller that may also share that bandwidth with pcie lanes, pci, etc by the time it makes it to the processor and back, etc? YMMV depending on the motherboard manufacturer, its components, and model.
The last I checked, 250 MBps is well within the capabilities of USB 3.0 specs.
maybe, but I think eSATA is the way to go thunderbolt will confuse customers because it is an identical port to the display port
yes.
usb 2.0 should be able to do 60mbps but is usually capped around the 20mbps range because its more for input devices apposed to storage. this is why firewire for a long time was preferred over usb, but usb had such a dominating install base, and apple being apple wont let people say firewire outside of mac...
thunderbolt is designed i believe ground up for storage solutions.
a hdd boot drive, depending on ho fragmented it is, runs around 60mbps, thats what mine clocked at before i moved to an ssd.
we already have ssds that hit the 1gb read write mark and need pcie slot to support them. thunderbolt will give them more head room for cheaper solutions.
plus i would rather have to much speed and let some go to waste than plug things into ports that are just good enough.
could be, but im assuming a hdd boot, and writing usb 2 as a mistake.
specs dont mean they will run that fast, just it should run that fast.
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that said, what is the read write speed of a 4tb hdd?