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Western Digital WD MyBook Thunderbolt Dual External Hard Drive Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips

2012-07-18
welcome to my unboxing of a pretty cool product this is the WD my book thunderbolt duo and what makes it duo is the fact that oh man okay give me a sec and we got the plastic off which is great okay so what makes this a duo harddrive is that it is a dual drive storage system ok peak performance for creative professionals more on how to achieve that in just a moment this is a 4 terabyte total capacity unit although it's available in a variety of configurations uses Thunderbolt technology although the cables sold separately and works with Mac OS X time machine and now that we have Thunderbolt on the PC it'll also work with whatever PC technologies you want to use it with as well so it's not just just a Mac product you guys this is very much a PC product - so don't hit that dislike bug just yet alright let's see what else the Western Digital has to say for themselves before we get too much further into this so we'll cover that later three-year warranty on this guy there's the front in real size oh it's not really actual size hold on let's see let's see how actual size they've gotten it because it doesn't look quite right to me hold on I do like it when on the outside of the box they do like an actual size thing is it right let's see see it's the heights right yeah oh it's almost almost it's very very close so that's what the unit looks like on this side you see ok we'll show you all the parts on the back later I use a blue blue okay yeah let's go so let's have a look at the included accessories power adapter remember no Thunderbolt cable included those they're still really really expensive so it's up to the user to source the Thunderbolt cable they show you how to plug in a Thunderbolt cable Thunderbolt plug-and-play so as long as your computer setup for it you should be fine alright why would you need one of these very simple answer and the simple answer is that you need extremely high speed or very reliable and high speed external storage so the two drives in here can be configured either as j-bot or as Jayvaughn which is just a bunch of discs so you'll have four four terabytes of non back top and non accelerated storage or as raid zero for high performance however if one of the drives inside were to fail you would lose all of the data on it so you'd want to make sure you're also doing like a nightly backup or something of your of your working drive because then you'd be using it as more like a high-performance external drive off of your laptop that you use for video or rendering or photo editing or something like that okay so you can use it for high performance or the third option is you can configure it in raid 1 which will give you the performance of a single drive and the capacity of a single drive so you'll be down to 2 terabytes of capacity however you will have complete redundancy between those two drives so if one drive just fails outright you know you drop the thunderbolt duo off your desk and one of the drives doesn't work anymore you're still ok all your data will be there so jayvon which gives you four gigs normal speed and if one drive dies only the data on it is lost the other data is fine so there's that then there's raid 0 which is high performance 4 terabytes of capacity but increased risk of data loss and then there's raid 1 which gives you single drive performance and perfect data recovery in the event of a hardware failure so the unit itself is pretty pretty plain you got your activity led your WD logo pretty plain on this side don't worry these on these marks aren't real these are just bits of packaging pretty plain on this side as well on the back you find the business end this is where we've got two Thunderbolt ports so you can use it as a pass-through if you have multiple storage devices or if you have other Thunderbolt devices remember there's not much now but more is coming or if you have a display port display that you want to pass through to that's why it has two for the daisy-chaining functionality of thunderbolt we've also got our power in and here is a really really cool feature about this now most external drives are not user serviceable this one ah there we go is so all you got to do is pop the top and I'm learning this in real time I have done no preparation on how to how to swap out a drive simply open the case and exchange the existing drive no tools needed do that okay so there's a little ventilated piece there so actually let's have a look at the ventilation so you got vent holes at the bottom vent holes no no vent holes at the back so they're relying on natural convection rubber feet here to get keep it a little bit off the table cold air will come in here rise and then go out of the top of the unit great okay so how are these uh-oh okay I think I get it and there we go WD caviar green drives it recommends to use WD green power drives only that might be a power restriction it might be a quiet restriction I mean you don't want something sitting on your desk to have really really loud seek times if you're using it all the time if it's sitting right next to your head for whatever reason Western Digital recommends using green drives in here so it's that simple all you got to do is take out these screws one two take this piece and put it on the screw when you put it into the new drive as well so that you'll actually be able to remove the new drive and you could oh that's that's cool so they're not walking you into this external storage unit they're actually giving you the option to go oh well to two terabyte drives isn't enough for me anymore and now there are six terabyte you know Green drives I can just buy a couple of those throw them in there and then I'm ready to have a way way bigger external thunderbolt storage solution because Thunderbolt is a standard that's going to matter for a long time now and you're getting a much better value with a product like this if you're going to be able to keep using it over an extended period of time so that's actually very very big of them to go ahead and do that so I'm just trying to get this back in at some point here you know what I'm not gonna stress about it too much but I think I got enough what's up yeah there's a cat thank you so much for contributing that to the to the video today there we go I got it so let's see if there's anything else that we're missing here all right so extra performance with raid 0 raid 1 mirrored do more work in less time right why would you want a thunderbolt external drive I mean I covered this very briefly before but might as well yeah just as fast okay there's that thank you for that contribution fundable is up to 10 gigabit per second although until hard drives get a fair bit faster even with raid zero we're not going to max that out we're going to need like uber drives this is for professionals this is for notebook users if your notebook has Thunderbolt then you can use this for huge mass storage on your desk that you can quickly and easily plug in so you plug in one cable boom your desktop monitors on your your storage is connected and you don't have to sort of fumble around with a bunch of different cables so there's that and then usage scenario number two is you need high-performance reliable external storage for a desktop PC that you're using for professional use a lot of the time it can be more convenient to use an external external storage device rather than throwing drives in and out of your your actual computer tower all the time I mean if you have a custom computer it might not be as hard but a lot of om computers it's a real hassle to fuss around with hard drives and this is comparatively very very easy so thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the my book Thunderbolt duel I will be doing a follow-up video on this one where we have a look at performance over thunderbolt with this particular device and a few different configurations so stay tuned for that on the NCIX pawn channel and don't forget to 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