Western Digital My Book VelociRaptor Duo Review

As I've mentioned before, I don't just stand in front of the camera in these videos, I also edit them. So you can imagine I have a particular fascination with new hard drive technology. When Western Digital (WD) proposed sending us their new My Book VelociRaptor Duo...Well, I first asked how it differed from their Thunderbolt Duo. The answer was that it actually has a pair of 10,000 RPM VelociRaptor drives which deliver 2TB of storage in a RAID 0 or 1 configuration (striped or mirrored). The drives are connected internally via a SATA 6Gb/s interface. And you can access the internals easily just by lifting the top of the chassis, twisting the cage lock and lifting out the drives individually.

Like the Thunderbolt Duo, it also employs the new Thunderbolt interface. And it does it right, with two ports which you can daisy chain, and an included cable – that’s almost unheard of because these cables typically cost around $50. The drive is made for speed, and we tested it out for use with editing both 1080p and full 2K editing and rendering. The attention has been on SSD technology lately, but products like the VelociRaptor offer even more attraction since platter drives are, in general, better at handling uncompressed files than solid state drives.

We found consistent write speeds in RAID 0 mode using 2GB test files of 380 MB/s and read speeds of 384 MB/s. Other tests showed similar read and write over 380MB/s with sequential tests. And with fragmented files the results were only about 7% slower. While tests will vary, the bottom line is that this is a fast drive that is fully rated to handle aggressive high speed video and graphics applications.

To put it in perspective, the My Book VelociRaptor Duo can pretty much transfer an 8GB Blu-ray disc in about 21 seconds. With RAID 0 you’ll get the maximum drive speed and RAID 1 support is there if you need it. And of course you can use JBOD (just a bunch of discs) mode.

The Western Digital My Book VelociRaptor Duo runs around $900, so you’re definitely paying for the performance. If you want cheap storage, this is not your product. If however, you want performance that rivals SSD storage but better accommodates the files encountered with video editing and other high speed data storage uses, this is a product you’ll want to consider.

This week’s question is: What would you or do you use an external hard drive for? Is it for backup, video editing, storing music or photos? Let us know in the comments and subscribe to our Youtube channel at youtube.com/audioholicslive. And like us at Facebook.com/Audioholics or follow us on Twitter @AudioholicsLive.

Unless otherwise indicated, this is a preview article for the featured product. A formal review may or may not follow in the future.