Western Digital My Book Duo DAS Review

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.