WD's New My Book Duo Puts 20TB On Your Desktop

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Western Digital's latest edition to the My Book Duo line of external drives boasts an impressive 20GB capacity.

This external hard drive features dual drive bays equipped with two RAID-optimized 10TB WD Red 7,200 RPM hard drives. All My Book Duo drives ship from the factory configured in RAID 0 by default but can be reconfigured for RAID 1 or JBOD (just a bunch of disks). According to the company, the My Book Duo 20TB is capable of hitting 360 MB/s sequential reads when operating in a RAID 0 configuration.

Each of the aforementioned RAID levels offer benefits and tradeoffs that you should carefully weigh before use. RAID 0 offers a higher level of performance by striping your data across both drives, but it lacks redundancy. RAID 1 mirrors your data onto both drives, thereby providing greater protection from unrecoverable read errors or failed hard drives. The drawback, though, is that the total amount of advertised drive space is reduced by half. JBOD, on the other hand, allows end users to utilize the full 20GB capacity of both hard drives at the expense of speed and data redundancy.

The My Book Duo is NTFS formatted, making it compatible with Windows 7/8/8.1/10. Reformatting is required for use with other operating systems. The drive features 256-bit AES hardware encryption and password protection to keep your data safe. Western Digital includes WD Backup, WD Security, and WD Drive Utilities to help manage your data.

This drive is equipped with a USB 3.1 Type-C port and two USB 3.0 Type-A ports. The latter can be used for accessories like a flash drive, webcam, or keyboard and mouse. These ports can also be used to charge devices such as smartphones and tablets. Western Digital also includes USB-C to USB-C and USB-C to USB-A cables in the box. The 20TB drive measures 100 x 180 x 160mm (WxHxL).

The My Book Duo will be available September 6. Retail pricing ranges from $280 for the 4TB model to $800 for the 20TB version.

Steven Lynch
18 Comments Comment from the forums
  • joz
    I for one don't have 20TB of porn, or pirated movies.

    So who is this marketed too? $800 for 20TB is a bit ridiculous. Two 10TB WD RED drives are only ~$250-280 ea.

    Do content producers need 20TB of external USB storage?
    Reply
  • greebo34
    So we travelled back to the 90's?
    "external drives boasts an impressive 20GB capacity"
    Reply
  • Emerald
    Now the question is if these are Red or Red Pro drives.

    Red drives are 5400rpm and ~$370.
    Red Pro drives are 7200rpm and ~$470.
    Reply
  • derekullo
    Imagine the rebuild time for a 10 terabyte drive ...

    No one who wants to store 20 terabytes of data is going to use raid 0.

    20 terabytes of data (10 terabytes effective) with just 2 drives in a raid 1 is also highly insecure due to the risk of a drive failing during your 37 hours best case rebuild when a drive fails

    20 terabytes / 150 megabytes a second = 133,333 seconds / 60 = 2222 minutes / 60 = 37 hours

    This feels like a accident waiting to happen.

    A better, more safe way to get 20 terabytes would be 7 - 4 terabyte drives in a raid 6, or better yet zraid2 for the zfs inclined.

    With ZFS, I would use 2 striped zraid1s consisting of 3 - 4 terabyte drives in each array, an effective raid 50, for an effective 16 terabytes.

    You could add a 3rd zraid1 if you really needed over 20 terabytes or add a mirrored vdev of 2 - 4 terabyte drives for exactly 20 terabytes

    Of course using 7 or even 9 drives to reach your goal is much more expensive than buying 2 - 10 terabyte drives, but that's the price you pay when you want 20 terabytes to actually be readable in 2 years.
    Reply
  • Foeke
    @jessicapreston what is this ongoing posting scams. Same thing on Anandtech. Wasn't this out of fassion in 2005? It really annoys me, mainly by reminding me of those scriptkiddies who wreaked havoc on all forums without captcha. This, making money without being productive, Chinese viagra and direct links to virusses.
    Reply
  • Vorador2
    @JOZ

    Dunno where you found those prices, but in europe the drive is 719€ from the WD website, and a 10 Tb WD Drive is about 400€ depending on the seller

    So it's actually cheaper per gigabyte, including VAT.
    Reply
  • menthol1979
    Or you put 2x10TB plain drives into your PC, configure them via Storage Pool as Mirror and voila, here you go.
    Reply
  • JakeWearingKhakis
    Well since most nice routers have USB ports for turning external storage into network storage this could make a decent NAS. Assuming you have your wifi configured correctly and securely.

    Still, 2 10TB drives is worrisome.
    Reply
  • parkerthon
    Worth noting in your overview that 0 not only lacks redundancy but also statistically multiplies your chances of data loss. One drive failure = total data loss. Jbod is essentially just lack of redundancy, but half your data could be recoverable in the event of a drive failure. I'm guessing only people interested in RAID 0 on a drive enclosure this size are seasoned video editing pro's though, and even then i question the need for that much 7200rpm scratch space.
    Reply
  • ledhead11
    I agree with others about the data safety issues of these drives. In regards to what you might need that much space, well 4k video could eat that up in a moderate amount of time depending on the compression used. For those who legally rip their BD's to disk the average is 30-50GB per. Hi-res 24/32bit audio can easily average 1-2GB per 60 minutes of audio. AAA PC games are averaging 30-60GB these days. Put all that together and it's not hard to get at least to 10GB. Twenty will take a while longer but not as long as it used to. I totally agree about the safety/reliability factors though. Never put all your eggs in one basket after all.
    Reply