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WD My Passport Pro Portable Thunderbolt Drive

2014-04-28
the CM storm SF 17 uses a massive 18 centimeter fan to cool your gaming notebook and it adds a four port USB hub click now to learn more often I look at an external Thunderbolt Drive and I can't really see any reason why it had to be thunderbolt a great example of this would be a single drive external drive that's bottlenecked by the drive performance rather than an alternative less expensive interface like USB 3 another example would be a large multi drive array device that I'd really rather see using a network solution like 10 Gigabit Ethernet let's get going on that standard huh but my passport pro is an exception here though it has two internal drives that can be run independently in raid 0 or in raid 1 and it legitimately benefits from thunderbolt running in raid 0 we were able to achieve consistent read and write speeds like sustained of about 200 megabytes per second better than we've ever been able to achieve on any USB 3 solution and because Thunderbolt is capable of outputting more power than USB it is also able to power up both drives without resorting to an auxiliary connector or wall power adapter something that will be a major advantage for anyone working on the go in fact it not only doesn't require a separate power Knable that is to say a connector and a cable integrated it also doesn't require you to cart a Thunderbolt cable around with you the cable is integrated and wraps around the drive for storage there is one trick with this drive though our physical inspection of it reveals that our 4 char byte model is extremely thick for an external hard drive it actually uses a fan for active cooling and as we get a closer look at that cable by the way this is how it wraps up and that's about how long it takes to wrap it up as we get a closer look at that we see just that cable there is no alternative connector such as USB 3 which would have added additional cost and bulk to the solution the My Passport pro only works over Thunderbolt which is something that will be a deal-breaker for many but given how focused this product is on Mac users of course they have Thunderbolt who are creative professionals I mean the drive utility program is only even available on Mac I doubt most people looking this drive will even notice and anyway using diskpart to manually delete the factory created Mac compatible partitions then creating our own structure gives us all the same functionality on a thunderbolt equipped PC you'll just need to import the foreign Drive configuration in disk manager whenever you plug it into a new PC piece of cake now I mentioned creative professionals before I guess that leads pretty well into the who is this product for segment of the video creative folks who are on the go this thing was practically made for us when shooting raw video footage or even ProRes sometimes we can easily fill up our dual 512 gigas SD reporter solution and having something that can offload very quickly using a notebook without needing to fuss about with power adapters or whatever else something with a lot of capacity is a huge boon the sooner we can get back to shooting the better because you've got actors and and helpers just sitting there when you're offloading footage eSATA would have been just as good for this and I really wish it had taken off as a standard but due to its specialized storage only nature non-powered standard configuration and fragile connector it was not meant to be so Thunderbolt will have to do the trick alright so far so good on the dual drive pro but what about the other solutions out there this is by no means the first dual external drive in fact we have an angel bird SSD to go twin that's fulfilled a similar need for us safe fast portable storage for almost a year but there are some differences while it's less likely be damaged in transit it's extremely expensive lower capacity and doesn't support trim so performance is actually gotten significantly slower since we first started using it which is something that can be addressed by secure erasing it but it's not always convenient when you got footage on it from this project and another project or whatever else there's also the sinner raid CRH 212 enclosure which is only about 50 bucks plus the cost of drives or something that's functionally pretty similar so it is less expensive but it only uses USB 3 so performance is lower it needs to be plugged into two ports for adequate power and it lacks the cooling solution used by the WD drive and they're also in the Amazon reviews also some complaints about the overall build quality of it and this one no complaints whatsoever so the only thing left now is the conclusion and for that I'll give you the rundown of how my team plans to use this raid zero and a portable drive is just plain stupid in my opinion yeah I ran some benchmarks for you before but in my mind that's only really useful from a theoretical standpoint the raid 1 speed reality check kind of sucks when you've been benchmarking raid zero but for a drive that's intended to be checked into a gear bag and carried around and jostled around with other equipment no matter how well it's built the likelihood of failure is so much higher than a drive that sits in your computer tower and never gets moved but that is really how I would recommend actually using it that way you've got two terabyte load with the four terabyte model you've got two terabytes of overall safe storage that's going to be there even in the event of a hardware failure which if you're backing up a project for samples canopy something that's pretty darn important so thank you guys very much for watching this video like it and share it if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it you can support us by checking out the support us link in the video description got all kinds of great stuff you can buy t-shirts you can give us a monthly contribution you can change your Amazon URL so that it includes our bookmark or whatever those things are called so it includes our affiliate code I think there are other things I say as always don't forget to subscribe I didn't write it in my script today and that's how reliant I've gotten on the teleprompter it's a sad state of affairs we should see if I can do a video blindfolded to see if I can even function without the teleprompter we'll just go like electricians tape thank you for watching this episode Linus tech tips without me being able to see for the last ten seconds of it this hurts you
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