WD släpper My Book med Velociraptor och Thunderbolt

Final Words

The Thunderbolt interface can easily deal with a ton of bandwidth. Given the right storage configuration you can sustain close to 1GB/s of transfers, while driving your display, all over a single unassuming cable. The advantages of Thunderbolt over USB 3.0 really come from its ability to hit ultra high transfer speeds, as well as its ability to connect storage and display to a notebook with a single cable. When a Thunderbolt device doesn't take full advantage of the former, then it quickly becomes a tougher sell.

In the case of the My Book VelociRaptor Duo, you get better performance than any other two-HDD Thunderbolt enclosure. The problem is it comes at a hefty price. With a cost per GB higher than most other Thunderbolt solutions, you have to really want the performance to make the VR Duo worthwhile. However, at only 400MB/s (about the speed of a single, good 6Gbps SSD), I'm not sure the cost is justified. If you've got good high speed storage inside your machine, I'd prefer going with the quieter, and more cost effective My Book Thunderbolt Duo instead.

The only exception to the Thunderbolt Duo recommendation would be if you had a workload too big to fit on a reasonable priced SSD array, but still needed better random IO performance. Similar to the VelociRaptor's appeal as a standalone hard drive, the My Book VelociRaptor Duo really targets a very specific niche. I suspect if you're a part of that niche, then you already know whether or not the VR Duo is right for you. For everyone else, there are more balanced options available.