WD 6TB My Book Duo Desktop RAID External Hard Drive - USB 3.0 - WDBLWE0060JCH-NESN

Very impressed with enclosure and the ease of setting it up. It is quiet with very fast transfer rates (not formally tested, but moved whole movies within seconds). Easy to service and replace drives. I am pleased that it uses the server-grade Red drives as this should improve reliability. Absolutely love the two additional USB drives on back which essentially serves as an additional USB 3.0 hub. All modes (RAID 0, RAID 1, JBOD) tested and work well. FYI, JBOD (just a bunch of disks) offers access to two drives which can be formatted in your choice of filesystems (FAT32, NTFS, ReFS, etc). IMPORTANT NOTE: Out of the box, the drive is RAID 0 mode and requires additional steps to change into a different mode (highly recommended).When looking into a backup or storage solution, one should consider all potential points of failure. Perhaps more importantly, one should have a recovery plan for each of the failure scenarios. I have attempted to list all these possible points of failure. In order of descending likelihood (your order may differ): 1. Single drive failure (not a question of if... but when) 2. Enclosure failure (internal RAID controller malfunctions, power supply failure, etc) 3. Catastrophic failure (theft, fire, simultaneous complete failure of BOTH drives)Firstly, for castrophic failures there are no recovery options. This is why critical information should always be backed up OFF-SITE, and why RAID is generally not considered a viable option for backup purposes.The most common form of failure is the single drive failure mentioned above. Importantly, RAID 0 will NOT protect against this common type of failure. Expect complete data loss! Thankfully, the RAID1 setting will help protect against the fairly common problem of single drive failure. Therefore, if you do not NEED the maximum capacity, I would highly recommend the RAID1 (data-mirroring) setting. In this case, even if one drive malfunctions you will have access to all your files. To successfully repair the mirroring function will require identification of the malfunctioning drive (which can sometimes be tricky) and then replacement with a new/different hard drive. In RAID 1 mode, the new disk will be re-populated with all the files from the working disk (hence the term mirror) and once again your files are protected from a single disk failure.One frequently omitted consideration is what would happen if the enclosure/RAID controller failed. In this scenario, there would be two functional but inaccessible disks "trapped" inside the enclosure with no access to your files. Though I did not test formally on this drive, in many RAID1 setups you should NOT expect to be able to take out the drives and simply connect them to your computer to get to your files. Often times there is hidden formatting on these disks that prevents them from being natively recognized by Windows and MAC. While I was not able to find any documentation on this specific drive, I did find complaints from WD My Book LIVE Duo users who had difficulty recovering files. Many of those users described having to pay for expensive recovery service or needed to access the disks using a Linux system.With that concern in mind, as a Windows 8+ user I setup my disks in JBOD mode which allowed me to use a new feature in Windows 8 called Storage Spaces. Storage Spaces works as a form of "software RAID" that also mirrors your data across two or more disks. One potential advantage of this setup is that an enclosure failure would be a comparatively minor inconvenience. I was able to find documentation that stated that access to your files could be maintained by hooking up either of the drives directly to your personal computer (without the enclosure). As such, a potentially costly and timely recovery process might be avoided. Also Storage Spaces allows for a mixed RAID setup using the two disks in the My Book DUO. For example once the two disks are added to the storage pool, I can make two different "drives" using this setup: (1) A mirrored disk which has built in redundancy, and (2) a striped disk with improved performance and the ability to use more of the available disk space. In my setup using a 6TB My Duo Book: Drive (1) is a mirrored backup drive with 1.5 TB of files on it (uses 3TB on the drive because it is mirrored), while Drive (2) being a "scratch" drive with a total of 3TB of free space. Using a setup like this, one can achieve backup of important files while maximizing storage space: 1.5 TB + 3 TB = 4.5 TB as compared to 3 TB on a fully mirrored drive. FYI, a drive that is setup using Storage Spaces is not compatible with Windows XP, Windows 7, or any other operating system (MacOS, Linux, etc).As stated above, I researched but did NOT personally test any of these failure scenarios. If you have personal experience with recovery of files from this drive, feel free to update in the comments sections. Good luck to you and your precious data. Enjoy.

So I was looking for a backup solution for my photos and I originally bought a LaCie 2Big setup. That thing was noisy, the blinking blue light was obtrusive, and it was just downright ugly. So I returned it, and bought this instead. Not only did this come with an extra 2 gigs (1 gig in raid 1) of storage, it also has two extra USB 3.0 slots, AND IT WAS $50 CHEAPER. Amazing.Functionality: This backup drive works great. I have mine setup in RAID 1 and dump all of my photos on here. I have a second WD external drive hooked into one of the USB 3.0 ports that I use for time machine backups. I use this drive with a rMBP; everything works great, no mac compatibility issues. Also the drives actually SLEEP when the computer is in SLEEP mode. What a concept! 5 Stars.Aesthetics: The enclosure is dark metallic gray with a black strip that has two LED lights for each drive to indicate which is active. I wanted a drive that was as quite as possible and that had no blinking lights. This drive (while it does have blinking lights) has the smallest blinking lights I could find. So I took a small piece of electrical tape and covered the lights, the black blends perfectly with the black and I've forgotten all about the LED lights. The drive is quite but does make some noise. The LaCie I previously owned made plenty of noise; I was convinced that thing was about to sprout a three stage rocket booster and liftoff, it was the noisiest thing I have ever heard. Seriously took me back to the days of MS-DOS. Anyway this thing is very quite compared to the LaCie, but does "whir" when the drives come to life; they're disk drives, not flash, it happens. The enclosure does as much as possible to limit the noise. I would say the noise is very minimal and should not be an issue for anyone. 5 stars despite blinking lights because those may be useful for someone.Conclusion: I would very highly recommend this drive over things like the LaCie. Cheaper, more storage, and it gives you 2 extra USB 3.0 ports.

With 6TB of external storage, the My Book Duo tries to hold itself up as a RAID option for non-power users. Here's my thoughts on the unit from an enthusasiast and general purpose user.I purchased the My Book Duo as primarily and archive system without having to spend $500-$600 on the competition. I don't need fast external storage for caching as the fusion drive in my iMac is sufficient. So this unit in RAID 0 works extremely well as a stand alone dump drive for photos, videos or other large amounts of data you want archived.Transfer speeds (read/write) are optimal, ranging from 100-15mbps in my experience. Not the best setup for fast caching but if you don't need that then the My Book Duo is perfect!I wanted to also offload thumbnail previews in Premiere Pro CC from my fusion drive so I've been testing using the My Book Duo and I'm surprisingly pleased that it works well!I haven't run into any issues with corrupt data (yet) after a month and I transfer A LOT of raw footage for my videos as backup.Only issue I have run into it is after waking my iMac from sleep the WD utility tells me there's an issue with the RAID configuration. After launching the utility everything shows up just fine and I do have the latest firmware so...The punch line is this,If you're looking for a very affordable external drive for your home or soho setup purely for holding storage, then the My Book Duo is perfect.For fast read/write enthusiast users, avoid this model and go for an external SSD or thunderbolt based configuration.Thanks for reading!

Easy set up. I had to reformat for TimeMachine backup with encryption. No problem. Been using it none stop with no issues. It's set up with no need to move it around, so no issues with connection, like some people have mentioned somewhere else. I've used WD drives since I moved from Seagate a decade ago. I've been very happy with the switch!

Un muy buen producto, fácil de instalar y configurar. Personalmente elegí este dispositivo para guardar información en RAID I dado que he tenido problemas con la información que almaceno, de momento ha funcionado bastante bien para eso y para almacenar videos que proyecto en la red de mi casa... no elegí un NAS debido a que mi red es muy simple y el precio se elevaba mucho para uso doméstico, de modo que se puede usar a la perfección con una televisión inteligente, pero se requiere de una computadora encendida todo el tiempo.

I currently have 1.0TB and 3.0TB HDDs that I manually copy the files to make a mirrored backup my data. Not a very good solution, and time consuming. So I bought this to use in RAID 1 to cut down on this wasted time. So far, it works great. Easy setup. Took a bit to find the option to format it as RAID 1, but eventually found it.The mirroring was my hope to get rid of my two other drives. If one fails, it can get replaced. However, in doing more research, I've not found out that if the ENCLOSURE fails, you might be screwed. The drives may be good, but you can't just remove them and connect them separately to your computer. This causes a big issue regarding the idea of "backing up your data". I've not seen a solution. So what does this mean? I'm not sure. For now, I'm going to use my 8.0TB Duo as my main backup, then use the 3.0TB as the redundancy. Since the 8.0TB mirrored is really 4.0TB, this works out ok. I current'y haven't even filled the 3.0TB. My issue was that I was filling the 1.5TB, and could not properly mirror it anymore.So I hope these is a solution to this problem. As another reviewer said, having two perfectly fine drives "trapped" in the dead enclosure is a huge "flaw" in the design. I said "flaw" because maybe that was the intent, but I think it's a glaring problem for people that think they are buying a Duo drive, to mirror their data, and thinking now they've covered all their bases (except catastrophic failure, ie. flood, fire, or anything physically happening to the enclosure and drives...)Bought it at $409.99. Fairly happy with the price. Anything higher, considering the enclosure issue, maybe buy two identical drives and setup an automatic backup.

Increíble producto, nos sirve en la empresa para poder guardar proyectos de video que realizamos y que pesan muchos gigabytes y que necesitamos tener guardado en un lugar seguro.

Fast and plentiful storage. Easy to set up for RAID 1 which gives you 4TB of storage (2 x 4TB).