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
Miscellaneous Aspects and Concluding Remarks
Some of the miscellaneous aspects of interest in the WD My Book Duo include RAID rebuild and power consumption. The LEDs in front begin to flash red when the volume enters a degraded state (and also during the rebuild process). The WD Drive Utilities provides insights into the health of the array. We simulated drive loss by pulling out one of the disks during data transfer (the array was obviously configured in RAID 1). The hardware LED status immediately began flashing red. The monitoring program also reflected the degradation, but, only after the drive had been dismounted and remounted. Inserting the removed disk into a PC's SATA slot didn't show the stored data (as expected, since this is hardware RAID). The gallery below provides more insight into our RAID rebuild evaluation.
The unit does not support hot-swapping drives (unlike the 2big Thunderbolt 2). After dismounting, a new WD Red drive of the same capacity was inserted. At this juncture, WD provides us two ways to rebuild RAID - either by pressing the reset button on the back of the unit, or, via the WD Drive Utilities software interface. We took the latter approach, as evidenced in the above gallery.
Coming to the business end of the review, the WD My Book Duo is a very attractive solution for users looking to get high speed access to large amounts of data. Advertised speeds are reached for certain types of workloads. USB 3.0 support is now almost universal, and eSATA is losing favour in the mass market. Therefore, the choice of a USB 3.0-only interface for this RAID-enabled DAS solution looks perfect. The inclusion of a two additional USB 3.0 ports in a hub configuration enhances the versatility of the unit. It makes sure that average users (who are not focused on getting maximum bandwidth to their peripherals all the time) don't need to 'sacrifice' a USB 3.0 port in their systems. There is also a comprehensive software suite to take advantage of the high-speed DAS.
There are really no negatives to talk about with respect to the My Book Duo. While earlier DAS units from Western Digital allowed only certain drives to be used for RAID rebuilds (by including a firmware check before allowing the rebuild), the My Book Duo has no such problems. Western Digital confirmed that the Red and Green drives are certified for rebuilds, but there are no restrictions in place regarding usage of any other SATA drive model of the appropriate capacity. Potential areas of improvement, however, include support for hot-swapping drives and provision for data recovery from a RAID 1-member drive directly connected to a PC.
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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.