Western Digital Unveils First Thunderbolt Enclosure

With the growing momentum of Thunderbolt on the Mac platform, it was only a matter of time before storage giant Western Digital unveiled its first solution. That comes in the form of the My Book Thunderbolt Duo, a dual-drive enclosure that, as you’d expect, connects via Thunderbolt in lieu of USB or LAN. Details are a little scarce on the product at the moment (including an actual photo of it; the one below is of a similar product), but it can be assumed that this product would also work on PCs, provided a Thunderbolt connection is available.

Unlike some of the professional Thunderbolt NAS solutions that we’ve seen trickle out in the past year, this enclosure doesn’t take great advantage of what Thunderbolt can offer, which is to be expected given its dual-drive nature. Speeds top out at 250MB/s on 6TB configurations (dual 3TB drives) and 225MB/s on 4TB configurations (dual 2TB drives).

Something I find a little interesting about this product is that there doesn’t seem to be a USB 3.0 equivalent, even though there could be. At 250MB/s, it’d take more than two of these devices to saturate a USB 3.0 bus, so to not see the option is a little strange. Another oddity is that pricing is unfortunately not mentioned here, nor whether a cable is included in the box or not. It can be assumed that this information and a lot more will be unveiled over the next month.

For those with Macs, this is still a great-looking option given the lack of USB 3.0 support on the platform. Hopefully we’ll see products like these ramp up in production soon so that the cost of adopting Thunderbolt plummets.