WD’s New My Book Duo Puts 20TB On Your Desktop

Western Digital’s latest edition to the My Book Duo line of external drives boasts an impressive 20GB capacity.

This external hard drive features dual drive bays equipped with two RAID-optimized 10TB WD Red 7,200 RPM hard drives. All My Book Duo drives ship from the factory configured in RAID 0 by default but can be reconfigured for RAID 1 or JBOD (just a bunch of disks). According to the company, the My Book Duo 20TB is capable of hitting 360 MB/s sequential reads when operating in a RAID 0 configuration.

Each of the aforementioned RAID levels offer benefits and tradeoffs that you should carefully weigh before use. RAID 0 offers a higher level of performance by striping your data across both drives, but it lacks redundancy. RAID 1 mirrors your data onto both drives, thereby providing greater protection from unrecoverable read errors or failed hard drives. The drawback, though, is that the total amount of advertised drive space is reduced by half. JBOD, on the other hand, allows end users to utilize the full 20GB capacity of both hard drives at the expense of speed and data redundancy.

The My Book Duo is NTFS formatted, making it compatible with Windows 7/8/8.1/10. Reformatting is required for use with other operating systems. The drive features 256-bit AES hardware encryption and password protection to keep your data safe. Western Digital includes WD Backup, WD Security, and WD Drive Utilities to help manage your data.

This drive is equipped with a USB 3.1 Type-C port and two USB 3.0 Type-A ports. The latter can be used for accessories like a flash drive, webcam, or keyboard and mouse. These ports can also be used to charge devices such as smartphones and tablets. Western Digital also includes USB-C to USB-C and USB-C to USB-A cables in the box. The 20TB drive measures 100 x 180 x 160mm (WxHxL).

The My Book Duo will be available September 6. Retail pricing ranges from $280 for the 4TB model to $800 for the 20TB version.