back to article Western Digital My Book Thunderbolt Duo

It's over a year since Apple began shipping Macs fitted with next-generation high bandwidth Thunderbolt ports, and they're now in the hands of millions of punters. But with Thunderbolt peripherals still few on the ground, they're all dressed up with nowhere to go. Western Digital My Book Thunderbolt Duo WDBUPB0040JSL Mac …

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  1. Steven Raith
    Stop

    Slow small file performance...

    I'd wager that's caused by using a rotational disk rather than an SSD, as opposed to it being a Thunderbolt over USB 3.0 thing.

    Any foo' know Thunderbolt is just PCI-E on a string, so with a decent controller it's just as quick as an internal SATA port.

    Steven R

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    you haven't explained why it's so expensive. A couple of 2TB disks cost, what, £150? So what's the other £250 buying you? Surely that's not all TB premium?

    1. JDX Gold badge

      How much do 2 external 2TB drives cost?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Why would that be relevant? Or are you claiming the enclosure on this thing is worth £400?

    2. Andrew Orlowski (Written by Reg staff)

      RAID premium

      Thunderbolt premium

      ... I can't think of anything else.

  3. P. Lee
    Paris Hilton

    Is it just me?

    Isn't tb just external PCIe? Why does a two port sata card + thunderbolt cost 250+?

    Give me a chassis with 6 disks slots which can stack with another one and you *might* have earnt your 250.

    In the meantime, can you LACP the $29 ethernet adapters and use iscsi to your own private server? You could run more smaller disks or even share it with the person next to you.

  4. Dave Horn

    Nearly £600 and they don't even include a Thunderbolt cable?

    I've returned printers costing a tenth of that because the manufacturers are too cheap to chuck a cable in the box.

  5. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge

    "I also cranked up Crystal Diskmark 3 – and the results...? Meh? Meh. No, that's what I thought, too. This is on a par with a USB thumb drive; the Windows drivers supplied aren't really ready for prime time."

    Where do I buy USB thumb drive that pushes 115MB/s?

    1. Mark 65

      Patriot Supersonic USB 3.0, Kingston DataTraveller Ultimate 3.0, Kingston HyperMax etc

      Cnet has them benchmarked at 129MB/s read speed

      http://www.cnet.com.au/patriot-supersonic-usb-3-0-32gb-339322609.htm

      Toms Hardware shows high benchmarks of up to 193MB/s for some of these...

      http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/usb-thumb-drive-charts/Read-Throughput-h2benchw-3.13-average,2292.html

    2. Robert E A Harvey

      >Where do I buy USB thumb drive that pushes 115MB/s?

      http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B006L4GMUQ/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Thunderbolt is DMA capable, USB ain't.

    3. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge
      Facepalm

      Blimey

      I obviously haven't been paying attention.

      Cheers.

  6. Mark 65

    Oops

    "The Thunderbolt Duo comes with two Caviar Green 2GB drives"

    That there is a bit of a problem. I've had the "green" part go in a couple of these. Spin up, spin down, spin up, spin down. Turn off to reset. Spin up, spin down etc etc. Took me 4 nights after work to copy the data off to reconcile it with the last backup. Poxy things. It was at that point I moved to OWC or Akitio enclosures and my choice of internal hard drive. I believe all WD externals use these things nowadays.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Ahem

    "The Thunderbolt Duo comes with two Caviar Green 2GB drives which can be configured in a mirrored or striped RAID array, or as plain old JBOD, giving 4GB."

    4GB? That's quite a price premium...

    1. Tom 38
      Thumb Up

      Re: Ahem

      I was impressed he could copy 11 GB of large files to any kind of RAID over 2 x 2 GB disks. They must be using some kind of wonderful compression technology.

  8. Sean Timarco Baggaley
    WTF?

    @Andrew Orlowski:

    "...doesn't include a Thunderbolt cable, and at £39, this isn't cheap."

    Compared to the price of the unit itself, it's not a huge proportion of the price, and it's still in its early days. Firewire and USB both took a while to catch on too. Oddly enough, it took Apple to give both the push they needed.

    At least those Thunderbolt cables cost £39 for a reason. They're active cables, not just a bunch of wires wrapped in plastic: there's a chip at each end too, and THAT is why the CPU activity monitor showed nary a blip.

    Believe me, USB 3 sucks for professional video work: USB uses a lot more of your valuable CPU cycles—cycles I'd much rather were being put to making me money, not making up for a cheap consumer piece of tat's failings.

    1. Gordon 11

      Re: @Andrew Orlowski:

      Believe me, USB 3 sucks for professional video work: USB uses a lot more of your valuable CPU cycles

      While I don't doubt you, as you seme to be reporting experience, the only experience I have of copying large amounts of data over USB3 is copying ~160GB of recorded TV files (so 1 to 2GB each) using a USB3/SATA bridge onto a WD10EURX drive. It wrote at 118MB/s and was using ~2% CPU (at the point I checked).

      1. Giles Jones Gold badge

        Re: @Andrew Orlowski:

        It's not so much the amount of CPU use, but the fact it interrupts the CPU when it is trying to do other more important things.

        For realtime work such as audio and video where you try to have as little latency as possible (pressing a key on a keyboard or moving a video controller) this can be a deal breaker. Less CPU interupption and more stable timing means you can drop the buffer sizes down.

        DMA isn't anything new, an Amiga 1000 from 1985 had it. So gawd knows why the PC compatible world likes cheap shitty non-DMA hardware. You wouldn't go back to PIO mode hard disks, the performance leap when UDMA came out was amazing. So why settle for USB.

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