Western Digital gave a more formal debut to its first Thunderbolt-equipped drive at Macworld/iWorld on Thursday. The My Book Thunderbolt Duo uses the fast 10Gbps port to feed two 3.5-inch hard drives at speeds that would be impractical for FireWire 800. On a 6TB Thunderbolt Duo, peak transfer speeds can hit over 250MBps (2Gbps), making the only bottleneck the drives themselves.
The speeds are vital for video and 3D editors and even usable on the MacBook Air. WD estimates that a full HD movie can shuttle to or from the drive in 30 seconds. At such speeds, it’s comparable to a mid-tier solid-state drive like the MacBook Air’s .
We saw the drive at a private party at CES and loved what we saw and found them to be very easy to set up.
Both 4TB and 6TB capacities will be available, each using a RAID 0 stripe to get the extra speed and continuous space.
While talking to WD at CES they said that the systems are right now only for Mac. They will be testing them with Windows-based PCs using true Thunderbolt connectors, such as the laptops from Lenovo that were just announced at CES.
