Western Digital My Book Duo DAS Review
by Ganesh T S on July 12, 2014 6:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- Western Digital
- DAS
Performance Evaluation
The WD My Book Duo ships in a RAID 0 configuration by default. We first processed our DAS test suite with the default configuration, before switching over to RAID 1 (using the WD Drive Utilities). We also tried setting up an encryption password and rerunning the benchmark numbers. The figures were quite similar (within the margins expected in repeated runs of the same benchmark), which led us to the conclusion that enabling / disabling encryption has no effect on the performance of the DAS. The full numbers are provided in the table below.
| WD My Book Duo 8 TB Performance (MBps) | ||||
| RAID 0 | RAID 1 | |||
| Read | Write | Read | Write | |
| Photos | 178.04 | 73.21 | 147.95 | 110.53 |
| Videos | 248.63 | 133.11 | 145.25 | 142.26 |
| Blu-ray Folder | 279.44 | 161.43 | 148.64 | 144.65 |
| Adobe Photoshop (Light) | 3.81 | 147.16 | 3.26 | 188.7 |
| Adobe Photoshop (Heavy) | 5.1 | 171.04 | 4.47 | 181.61 |
| Adobe After Effects | 3.71 | 47.18 | 3.1 | 65.43 |
| Adobe Illustrator | 3.8 | 76.16 | 3.23 | 94.68 |
While RAID 0, as expected, performs better for large file transfers (such as Blu-ray folders), RAID 1 wins out on some types of workloads too. On the whole, the DAS fulfills its advertised potential. Reaching up to almost 280 MBps for certain workloads, it is definitely a compelling solution for consumers looking for fast and reliable high capacity storage at a reasonable cost.
Various power consumption numbers, as well as duration for RAID rebuild (which is discussed in detail in the next section) are provided in the table below.
| WD My Book Duo 8 TB Power Consumption & RAID Rebuild | |||
| Activity | Duration | Avg. Power Consumption | |
| Idle | - | 12.41 W | |
| Disks Head Parked | 10.22 W | ||
| Disks Spun Down | - | 2.19 W | |
| Benchmark Mode (RAID 0) | - | 14.61 W | |
| Benchmark Mode (RAID 1) | - | 16.15 W | |
| RAID-1 Rebuild | 9h 47m 9s | 15.99 W | |
We find that the power consumption numbers are quite low compared to the 2big Thunderbolt 2. The presence of a 5400 rpm hard drive, coupled with some nifty firmware features help the My Book Duo score over the Desktop HDD-laden LaCie 2big Thunderbolt 2 in this aspect.
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PEJUman - Saturday, July 12, 2014 - link
it's also only $100 if you factor the 2 x 4TB reds in it worth $350.fteoath64 - Sunday, July 13, 2014 - link
If you put it that way, then $100 for the enclosure, PSU and controller board would be reasonable, so it is a good buy if a DAS suits your needs using USB3 only interfaces with the added value of a hub tossed in as extra!.fteoath64 - Sunday, July 13, 2014 - link
Clearly this is a DAS as opposed to a NAS that you would like to expect. Totally different kettle-of-fish!.Cerb - Sunday, July 13, 2014 - link
Um, OK. Is there any reason why it can't connect to your router or Plex server? While the review is a little ambiguous, there's no mention of needing added OS-specific drivers just to see the drives, so it *may* work with [most USB UMC enabled] routers just fine.Zak - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link
OKdarwinosx - Sunday, July 13, 2014 - link
You couldn't test it on a Mac too? With all the Apple articles Anandtech does? I'd like to know about the Mac software and performance.name99 - Sunday, July 13, 2014 - link
What problem do you want to solve on a Mac?This will give you a single glob of 8GB storage with minimal config, but you're paying for that convenience. That's fine, but there are cheaper and/or higher performing alternatives.
If you're willing to do just a little config, for the same sort of price you could buy
- a USB3 hub
- a 256GB external USB3 SSD
- two USB3 4TB hard drives
You could then use Apple SW RAID to stripe the HDs together, and use CoreStorage (using the commandline diskutil command) to fuse the SSD to the striped RAID. What you'd have will give you the performance of this box for throughput, but with the zippiness of SSDs for the random access. I have a system like this (although put together from substantially older equipment --- an old 64GB SSD and two REALLY old 300GB HDs) and it works astonishingly well given the age of the equipment, especially the HDs.
darwinosx - Tuesday, August 5, 2014 - link
I am already using two USB 3 drives and carbon copy cloner. I want a more minimal solution. Interesting solution with SSD but I don't need speed for a backup solution.DanNeely - Sunday, July 13, 2014 - link
AT authors work remotely (and live all over the world) so there isn't a single shared testbed, nor can they easily loan hardware back and forth for testing. Since Apple doesn't donate hardware to build testbeds, the only authors who have Apple devices to test with are those who've bought Apple computers with their own money for personal use.darwinosx - Tuesday, August 5, 2014 - link
Anandtech has plenty of Macs availalbe which is really obvious.