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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BillT2014 - Monday, July 14, 2014 - link
I've never before heard that a raid1 component drive might not be universally readable. All the controller is supposed to do is make the two drives identical. A single component of the RAID should be readable by any other system that supports that filesystem.jamyryals - Monday, July 14, 2014 - link
Would this, or something similar from another manufacturer, work connection to a USB 2.0 port? I would like to use this connected to an older machine, but I don't really want to add a USB 3.0 adapter card. If the device slowed to USB 2.0 speeds that would be fine.celestialgrave - Tuesday, July 15, 2014 - link
How hot did the drives get? Did the fan ever have to spin up to full speed? How would you characterize the fan noise?BillT2014 - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
Still waiting for an explanation of this sentence:" Inserting the removed disk into a PC's SATA slot didn't show the stored data (as expected, since this is hardware RAID)."
This defies all sense. RAID is RAID whether it is software or hardware. Maybe the reason the drive wasn't readable is because it was a RAID 0 component? That would never be readable as such under any circumstances. But a RAID 1 drive should always be readable.
Well?
BillT2014 - Friday, March 27, 2015 - link
The final sentence also defies everything we know about RAID:"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."
The reviewer ought to know that if a RAID 1-member drive, directly connected to a PC, is not recoverable, then the problem is the reviewer, not the drive.
One might wonder if the reviewer was unwittingly testing a RAID 0 member?
These issues should be addressed and the review should be corrected. It's amazing that it has stood so long like this.
yeub - Sunday, March 29, 2020 - link
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