Print 16 comment(s) - last by tastyratz.. on Sep 2 at 5:40 PM

Blazing fast external HDD includes dual Thunderbolt ports

Western Digital has announced its fastest My Book external hard drive ever produced. The new drive is called the My Book VelociRaptor Duo and uses a pair of 10,000 RPM 1 TB hard drives combined with Thunderbolt technology. The combination of Thunderbolt and 10,000 RPM hard drives gives incredible speed for data access and incredible speed for connectivity between the drive and the computer. 
The 2TB external solution includes a pair of Thunderbolt ports and Western Digital says that the high-capacity and fast drive is ideal for editing high-resolution video, 3-D rendering, graphic design, and other performance demanding digital media applications. The dual disc external hard drive provides data transfer rates of up to 400 MB/s.

The drive supports both RAID 0 and RAID 1 for performance or data protection. The dual Thunderbolt ports allow the user to daisy chain multiple VelociRaptor Duo drives or other high-performance peripherals without affecting performance.
The drive also supports JBOD option for users are running Windows on a Mac computer. The drive comes out-of-the-box ready for work with Apple Time Machine and is HFS+ Journaled for Mac computers.
The drive is available in select retailers and online now for $899.99.

Source: Western Digital

Comments     Threshold


By Argon18 on 8/30/2012 9:50:27 AM , Rating: 2
Wowie that's hot!! In RAID0 mode, reads ought to be 400+ MB/s and writes 300+ MB/s.

RE: Droooool!
By retrospooty on 8/30/2012 10:27:17 AM , Rating: 3
Or get a SSD and blow it away.

I am not sure the market for this. High performance, = SSD by a mile and even if a HDD, why would anyone need high performance externally? External = backup for the most part, so any large drive will do. A high performance external backup just doesnt seem like a big seller. For the niche market that needs high performance and external, SSD seems a better bet.

RE: Droooool!
By dj LiTh on 8/30/2012 5:14:22 PM , Rating: 2
Go ahead, price out 2TB of SSD goodness for us for under $899, i double dog dare ya.

RE: Droooool!
By retrospooty on 8/30/2012 6:02:40 PM , Rating: 1
If your concerned with price, why would you be getting 2tb raptors? Get a cheaper normal 2tb drive. It just doesnt make sense for external.

RE: Droooool!
By dgingerich on 8/30/2012 8:29:28 PM , Rating: 2
I've priced out what 2TB of SSD storage, with a near equal interface to Thunderbolt, would run. For the drives, it would be either 2 512GB SSDs at $400 each, (or alternatively 8 256GB drives at $200 each, but the enclosure would be more expensive) an external SAS controller (LSI/3ware 9750-8e) at $800, and an external 4 bay SAS enclosure with 2 SFF-8088 cables at $300. Total that up and you get $2700. Sure, it's a lot faster bandwidth (around 1200MB/s, faster than Thunderbolt can handle) and seek times, but at 3 times the cost.

Actually, I'm almost drooling looking at this stuff. I might actually go for something like this next year, if I can get a better job to pay for it.

RE: Droooool!
By retrospooty on 8/30/2012 8:49:52 PM , Rating: 1
To do what?

What benefit does paying so much extra to have a faster external drive give you? IF its to have it as a bootable drive for multiple OS's that is cool if you need it, but you would be an extremely rare customer.

RE: Droooool!
By dgingerich on 8/31/2012 12:22:32 PM , Rating: 2
You were the one who mentioned SSDs being so superior to the drive in this article. I'm just making it clear to you just what you're suggesting. Yes, they're superior, but in order to get that superiority, you have to pay for it. That's just keeping the storage size the same.

The fact of the matter is that each type of drive, from 5400 and 7200rpm consumer drives to 10k and 15k rpm professional level drives to SSDs, have their places. SSDs are great for OS and program storage. At one point, they would have been great for just single apps, but too expensive and too unreliable for the OS. Things change. Slower, standard drives are good for data storage. A day may come when SSDs would be best for all storage. We aren't there yet.

I have a total of 4 SSDs in my main machine, one for the OS and office apps, one for games, one specifically for the WoW beta, and one specifically for WoW. I also have 3 regular hard drives: two 2TB drives in a mirror for data storage and one 3TB drive for nightly backups. I swapped the hard drive in my laptop with an SSD, but I still keep the 640GB 5400rpm drive it came with in a USB3 enclosure for data storage ont he go. It is good to keep in mind the strengths and weaknesses of things so you know when to use them, and adjust your habits when those strengths and weaknesses change. Don't just throw things away when new technology or new ideas come along. There is still value in older technology and ideas if they are used right.

RE: Droooool!
By someguy123 on 8/30/2012 9:19:39 PM , Rating: 2
When you're talking gigabytes to terabytes of material you'd much rather take the drive with you when delivering to different systems at work or when you're traveling.

Arguably this thing would be worthless if you were to read off of it directly considering the substantially worse I/O compared to SSD, but I could see it being used as a fast storage device that offloads quickly onto a smaller local SSD considering its raw throughput. Small market, but then again TB's market is niche to begin with until Intel passes it on to PCs.

RE: Droooool!
By retrospooty on 8/31/2012 9:23:44 AM , Rating: 2

Yes, and you have just described what must be less than 1/10th of 1% of external buyers. A niche market is an understatement.

RE: Droooool!
By someguy123 on 8/31/2012 12:59:13 PM , Rating: 2
Well obviously....I don't see your point. There are many niche markets that get catered to, and this one happens to pay substantial premiums.

RE: Droooool!
By tastyratz on 9/2/2012 5:40:02 PM , Rating: 2
I can see where this has an application in the business world, absolutely.
Specifically I can see this working for large file transfers across sites with undersized wan's, or limiting downtime.

Consider machine images and deployment on critical machines where downtime int he minutes costs dearly. If you can backup or deploy with locally connected devices you can ensure your more critical machines are back up in 5 minutes instead of 20. If it's a server or central hub that could mean an extra 15 minutes of productivity for the 5 people waiting on it. Maybe it's a machine used in medical or the banking fields.

Maybe you need offline images of multiple machines, if it's 5 minutes a box and you have 10 to backup this saves quite the time.

SSD is awesome for a work drive and multiple users pulling small files. This however has high raw sequential reads and writes. If you need large transfers to and from machines in a short period of time, then yea this is a better value than ssd's per gb of storage.

If it doesn't make sense to you then neither does the price tag. For 2tb of enterprise quality storage in the fastest form available and more portability than a tape based solution, this might work.

RE: Droooool!
By Trisped on 8/31/2012 8:14:42 PM , Rating: 2
Most likely these are targeting those working with Video and large pictures.

For example, it is very common for a special effect artist to work with the uncompressed 2k video. While an SSD would be a better solution, getting 2TB or more storage is still a bit expensive. This represents a mid way option, volume of HDD, but speeds comparable to SSD, at 1/2 the price. Plus they can daisy chain more units and they can use those fancy Thunderbolt ports their Mac came with.

RE: Droooool!
By kattanna on 8/30/2012 10:29:36 AM , Rating: 4
Wowie that's hot!!

literally, yes

I remember back when I used to use raptor hard drives and man they would get hot.. even in my nicely cooled case.

but now I use SSD's and havent looked back.

