 Welcome to my unboxing of a pretty cool product. This is the WD MyBook Thunderbolt Duo, and what makes it Duo is the fact that... Oh man, okay, give me a sec. And we got the plastic off, which is great. Okay, so what makes this a Duo hard drive is that it is a dual drive storage system, okay, peak performance for creative professionals. More on how to achieve that in just a moment. This is a 4TB total capacity unit, although it's available in a variety of configurations, uses Thunderbolt technology, although the cable is sold separately and works with Mac OS X Time Machine. And now that we have Thunderbolt on the PC, it'll also work with whatever PC technologies you want to use it with as well. So it's not just a Mac product, you guys. This is very much a PC product too. So don't hit that dislike button just yet. Alright, let's see what else Western Digital has to say for themselves before we get too much further into this. So we'll cover that later. Three year warranty on this guy. There's the front in real size. Oh, is that really actual size? Hold on, let's see. Let's see how actual size they've gotten it, because it doesn't look quite right to me. Hold on. Hold on. I do like it when on the outside of the box they do like an actual size thing. Is it right? Let's see. Let's see if the height's right. Yeah! Almost, almost. It's very, very close. So that's what the unit looks like. On this side you see, okay, we'll show you all the ports on the back later. User blah blah blah blah. Okay, yeah, let's go. So let's have a look at the included accessories. Power adapter. Remember, no Thunderbolt cable included. They're still really, really expensive, so it's up to the user to source a Thunderbolt cable and show you how to plug in a Thunderbolt cable. Thunderbolt plug and play, so as long as your computer's set up for it you should be fine. Alright. Why would you need one of these? Very simple answer, and the simple answer is that you need extremely high speed or very reliable and high speed external storage. So the two drives in here can be configured either as JBOD, which is just a bunch of disks, so you'll have four terabytes of non-backed up and non-accelerated storage, or as RAID 0 for high performance. However, if one of the drives inside were to fail you would lose all of the data on it so you'd want to make sure you're also doing like a nightly backup or something of your working drive because then you'd be using it as more like a high performance external drive off of your laptop that you use for video or rendering or photo editing or something like that. You can use it for high performance. Or the third option is you can configure it in RAID 1, which will give you the performance of a single drive and the capacity of a single drive, so you'll be down to two terabytes of capacity. However, you will have complete redundancy between those two drives. So if one drive just fails outright, you drop the Thunderbolt Duo off your desk and one of the drives doesn't work anymore, you're still okay. All your data will be there. So JBOD, which gives you 4 gigs, normal speed, and if one drive dies only the data on it is lost, the other data is fine, so there's that. Then there's RAID 0, which is high performance, four terabytes of capacity, but increased risk of data loss. And then there's RAID 1, which gives you single drive performance and perfect data recovery in the event of a hardware failure. So the unit itself is pretty, pretty plain. You got your activity LED, your WD logo, pretty plain on this side, don't worry, these marks aren't real, these are just bits of packaging. Pretty plain on this side as well. On the back you find the business end. This is where we've got two Thunderbolt ports, so you can use it as a pass-through. If you have multiple storage devices or if you have other Thunderbolt devices, remember there's not much now, but more is coming. Or if you have a DisplayPort display that you want to pass through to, that's why it has two for the daisy chaining functionality of Thunderbolt. We've also got our power in. And here is a really, really cool feature about this. Now most external drives are not user serviceable. This one, ah there we go, is. So all you gotta do is pop the top, and I'm learning this in real time, I have done no preparation on how to swap out a drive. Simply open the case and exchange the existing drive, no tools needed. Look at that, okay, so there's a little ventilated piece there, so actually let's have a look at the ventilation. So you've got vent holes at the bottom, vent holes, no, no vent holes at the back, so they're relying on natural convection. Rubber feet here to keep it a little bit off the table. Cold air will come in here, rise, and then go out of the top of the unit. Great. Okay, so how are these, ah, oh okay, I think I get it. And there we go. WD Caviar Green drives. It recommends to use WD Green Power drives only. That might be a power restriction, it might be a quiet restriction, I mean you don't want something sitting on your desk to have really really loud seek times if you're using it all the time, if it's sitting right next to your head. For whatever reason, Western Digital recommends using green drives in here. So it's that simple. All you gotta do is take out these screws, one, two, take this piece and put it on the screw when you put it into the new drive as well so that you'll actually be able to remove the new drive and you could, oh that's cool. So they're not locking you into this external storage unit. They're actually giving you the option to go, oh well two two terabyte drives isn't enough for me anymore and now there are six terabyte green drives. I can just buy a couple of those, throw them in there, and then I'm ready to have a way way bigger external Thunderbolt storage solution. Because Thunderbolt is a standard that's gonna matter for a long time now and you're getting a much better value with a product like this if you're gonna be able to keep using it over an extended period of time. So that's actually very very big of them to go ahead and do that. So I'm just trying to get this back in at some point here. You know what, I'm not gonna stress about it too much but I think I got it. Now let's have a, yep there's a cat. Thank you Slick for contributing that to the video today. There we go I got it. So let's see if there's anything else that we're missing here. Alright so extra performance with RAID 0, RAID 1 mirrored, do more work in less time. Alright why would you want a Thunderbolt external drive? I mean I covered this very briefly before but might as well, yeah that's fast, okay there's that. Thank you for that contribution. Thunderbolt is up to 10 gigabit per second although until hard drives get a fair bit faster even with RAID 0 we're not gonna max that out. We're gonna need like uber drives. This is for professionals, this is for notebook users. If your notebook has Thunderbolt then you can use this for huge mass storage on your desk that you can quickly and easily plug in so you plug in one cable, boom your desktop monitor's on, your storage is connected and you don't have to sort of fumble around with a bunch of different cables so there's that. And then usage scenario number two is you need high performance reliable external storage for a desktop PC that you're using for professional use. A lot of the time it can be more convenient to use an external storage device rather than throwing drives in and out of your actual computer tower all the time. I mean if you have a custom computer it might not be as hard but a lot of OEM computers it's a real hassle to fuss around with hard drives and this is comparatively very very easy. So thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the MyBook Thunderbolt Duo. I will be doing a follow up video on this one where we have a look at performance over Thunderbolt with this particular device in a few different configurations so stay tuned for that on the NCIXcom channel and don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips.