WD 16TB My Book Duo Desktop HDD USB 3.1 Gen 1 with software for device management, backup and password protection USB-C and USB-A cables RAID 0/1, JBOD

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Connection speeds for both read and write are good and more than fast enough for you to edit 1080p video directly from the drive. I found that the My Book Duo was faster than My Book. Here are the speeds of the My Book Duo in JBOD, compared to the regular WD My Book. The top two are sequential, while the bottom two are random. I did these tests using a USB Type C to Type C cable connected to a USB 3.1 port. WD My Book speed vs. WD My Book Duo speed in JBOD configuration

Similarly, JBOD (just-a-bunch-of-drives) seems redundant as it offers neither the resilience of mirroring nor the performance of RAID 0.Chance of failure: normal. If the normal chance of failure of one drive is 1%, the chance of failure using JBOD is 1%. Alongside the two drives is the RAID hardware, this comes pre-configured as RAID 0 which optimises speed and capacity for the drive.

I do a lot of photo editing and video editing, and I couldn’t get a clear answer on this. At first I tried RAID-0, and usually it seemed faster, although sometimes it was slower. I found that when I was extracting zip files from within the My Book Duo in RAID-0, it was extremely slow. Whereas on my usual external drive, expanding that same zip file took only a second or two, it would take a minute or longer on the My Book Duo.

This Duo needs to go on a diet

Meanwhile, I was somewhat concerned about reliability too. Is hard drive failure real? Yes it has happened to me, a couple of years ago, on a Sandisk SSD drive that I was using as my C: drive on one of my PCs. One day, my PC couldn’t load it and it took a reboot to be able to read it. The same thing happened the next day. The third day it just stopped loading altogether. And just this week in one of the Facebook groups for 360 cameras, someone posted that their hard drive failed. So it is uncommon, but it happens. The beauty of the Duo is that you can easily remove the top and replace the drives if required, assuming you’ve removed all the data previously and powered down the drives. Connection to your computer is via USB Type-C, and cables come for both this standard and to convert a conventional USB 3.0 port to the Type-C variety if you haven’t embraced that newish connector yet.