WD Releases Its ‘Fastest External Solution’ With The My Book Pro

Releasing an updated NAS OS and home NAS wasn’t enough for WD this week, as the company has also announced a brand-new RAID enclosure that it touts as being its “fastest external solution”. As its My Book Pro name implies, this enclosure is targeted at those who need the fastest access to bulk storage possible.

Like QNAP’s TVS-871T, the My Book Pro features Intel Thunderbolt 2.0 ports to give users access to 20Gb/s pipes. This enclosure features two such ports, allowing two computers to access the storage simultaneously. And that’s important – unlike QNAP’s NAS, My Book Pro isn’t a NAS at all. It features dual Thunderbolt ports as just mentioned, as well as three USB 3.0 ports – one for connecting to a PC, and two for plugging additional storage into.

I think that putting 20GB/s ports on a 2-bay NAS is a bit odd, as USB 3.0 is capable of handling the speeds this thing is capable of – 435MB/s when dual 6TB drives are used in RAID 0. I’d think such bandwidth capabilities would better serve NASes with four bays or more (and even then, only if RAID 0 is used), but, I guess there’s something to be said about being able to plug the enclosure into a port that’s never, ever going to become the bottleneck. And, that does ignore the fact that other TB 2.0 devices can be daisy-chained off of this.

If RAID 0 doesn’t sound like a good idea, the enclosure can also be configured for RAID 1 and JBOD. If you’re interested in picking one up, it can be had right now at the WD store, in models ranging from 6TB to 12TB – the former of which is selling for $599, and the latter, $999.

Sept 3 Edit: I erroneously called this the My Cloud Pro, not My Book Pro.