Just weeks after announcing its first Thunderbolt hard drives, Western Digital appropriately brought the offerings to show off at the Macworld iWorld expo in San Francisco. Electronista took a close look at several of the company's My Book Thunderbolt Duo drives, which were daisy chained to a Thunderbolt display.
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.
Western Digital leapt into mobile access for remote storage on Tuesday by putting out mobile iOS and Android apps to connect to its MyBook Live networked hard drives. Both the free WD 2go (App Store, Android Market) and $3 WD 2go Pro (App Store, Android Market) let users get at music, photos, videos, and general files from a My Book Live at home. The move provides a way to stream content that wouldn't fit on a phone or tablet.
Western Digital put out one of the largest capacity dual-disk external drives on Thursday by introducing a 6TB version of the My Book Studio Edition II. The drive pairs two of the still-rare 3TB drives, optionally in a RAID mirror or stripe, and is aimed primarily at creative pros who deal with very large photos or videos on a regular basis. It comes pre-formatted for Macs; it can be reformatted for Windows, but it needs at least Vista or 7 to see more than 2.1TB.
Western Digital today unveiled three additions to its external drive line. An updated My Passport Essential is Western Digital's smallest portable drive, and has a storage capacity of 500GB with USB 3.0 new to the group. The My Passport Essential SE portable drive comes in either 750GB or 1TB capacity and also uses USB 3.0. The My Book Essential desktop external drive also now reaches 3TB with the faster speed intact.
Western Digital today put out a new, high-end external My Book hard drive just for Mac users. The Studio LX replaces the usual plastic body with a modern, aluminum shell that both parallels modern Mac design and stays cooler when the drive is running. Much of the Studio's Mac-oriented features are the same and center on both the FireWire 800 ports and pre-formatting for the HFS+ Journaled file system.
WD on Wednesday announced the launch of its redesigned My Book World Edition II dual-drive network storage system (NAS). Available in 2TB and 4TB capacities, the dual-drive systems ship set up in a mirrored (RAID 1) drive array, backing up data simultaneously to both drives, making it safe in case one fails. WD also includes backup software meant to make scheduling automatic data backup easier for inexperienced Windows PC users.
Western Digital today gave all of its single-disk My Book external hard drives new 2TB capacity levels. The upgrade is equivalent to about 241 hours of full-bitrate HD and is particularly described as useful for Mac users or frequent shoppers from iTunes. At least 250 million TV shows have been bought, according to data from Apple, while over 33 million movies have either been rented or bought outright.
