 The CM Storm SF17 uses a massive 18 centimeter fan to cool your gaming notebook and it adds a four-port USB hub. Click now to learn more. Often I look at an external Thunderbolt drive and I can't really see any reason why it had to be Thunderbolt. A great example of this would be a single drive, external drive, that's bottlenecked by the drive performance rather than an alternative less expensive interface like USB 3. Another example would be a large multi-drive array device that I'd really rather see using a network solution like 10 gigabit Ethernet. Like let's get going on that standard, huh? But my Passport Pro is an exception here though. It has two internal drives that can be run independently in RAID 0 or in RAID 1 and it legitimately benefits from Thunderbolt. Running in RAID 0 we were able to achieve consistent read and write speeds like sustained of about 200 megabytes per second, better than we've ever been able to achieve on any USB 3 solution, and because Thunderbolt is capable about putting more power than USB, it is also able to power up both drives without resorting to an auxiliary connector or wall power adapter, something that will be a major advantage for anyone working on the go. In fact, it not only doesn't require a separate power canable, that is to say a connector and a cable integrated, it also doesn't require you to cart a Thunderbolt cable around with you. The cable is integrated and wraps around the drive for storage. There is one trick with this drive though. Our physical inspection of it reveals that our 4TB model is extremely thick for an external hard drive. It actually uses a fan for active cooling and as we get a closer look at that cable, by the way this is how it wraps up and that's about how long it takes to wrap it up, as we get a closer look at that we see just that cable. There is no alternative connector such as USB 3, which would have added additional cost and bulk to the solution. The My Passport Pro only works over Thunderbolt, which is something that will be a deal breaker for many, but given how focused this product is on Mac users, of course they have Thunderbolt, who are creative professionals, I mean the drive utility program is only even available on Mac, I doubt most people looking at this drive will even notice. And anyway, using diskpart to manually delete the factory created Mac compatible partitions, then creating our own structure gives us all the same functionality on a Thunderbolt equipped PC. You'll just need to import the foreign drive configuration in Disk Manager whenever you plug it into a new PC. Piece of cake. Now, I mentioned creative professionals before and I guess that leads pretty well into the who is this product for segment of the video. Creative folks who are on the go. This thing was practically made for us. When shooting raw video footage or even ProRes sometimes, we can easily fill up our dual 512 gig SSD recorder solution and having something that can offload very quickly, using a notebook without needing to fuss about with power adapters or whatever else, something with a lot of capacity is a huge boon. The sooner we can get back to shooting, the better because you've got actors and helpers just sitting there when you're offloading footage. E-SATA would have been just as good for this and I really wish it had taken off as a standard, but due to its specialized storage only nature, non-powered standard configuration and fragile connector, it was not meant to be, so Thunderbolt will have to do the trick. Alright, so far so good on the Dual Drive Pro, but what about the other solutions out there? This is by no means the first dual external drive. In fact, we have an Angelbird SSD to-go twin that's fulfilled a similar need for us, safe, fast, portable storage for almost a year, but there are some differences. While it's less likely to be damaged in transit, it's extremely expensive, lower capacity and doesn't support trim, so performance has actually gotten significantly slower since we first started using it, which is something that can be addressed by secure erasing it, but it's not always convenient when you got footage on it from this project, then another project or whatever else. There's also the CineRaid CR-H212 enclosure, which is only about 50 bucks plus the cost of drives for something that's functionally pretty similar, so it is less expensive, but it only uses USB 3, so performance is lower, it needs to be plugged into two ports for adequate power, and it lacks the cooling solution used by the WD drive, and there are also in the Amazon reviews also some complaints about the overall build quality of it, and this one, no complaints whatsoever. So the only thing left now is the conclusion, and for that I'll give you the rundown of how my team plans to use this. RAID 0 in a portable drive is just plain stupid in my opinion. Yeah, I ran some benchmarks for you before, but in my mind that's only really useful from a theoretical standpoint. The RAID 1 speed reality check kind of sucks when you've been benchmarking in RAID 0, but for a drive that's intended to be chucked into a gear bag and carried around and jostled around with other equipment, no matter how well it's built, the likelihood of failure is so much higher than a drive that sits in your computer tower and never gets moved, that that is really how I would recommend actually using it. That way you've got 2 terabyte, well with the 4 terabyte model, you've got 2 terabytes of overall safe storage that's going to be there even in the event of a hardware failure, which if you're backing up a project for example, it's going to be something that's pretty darn important. So thank you guys very much for watching this video. Like it and share it if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it. You can support us by checking out the support us link in the video description. Got all kinds of great stuff. You can buy t-shirts, you can give us a monthly contribution, you can change your Amazon URL so that it includes our bookmark or whatever those things are called, so it includes our affiliate code. I think there are other things I say. As always, don't forget to subscribe. I didn't write it in my script today, and that's how reliant I've gotten on the teleprompter. It's a sad state of affairs. We should see if I can do a video blindfolded to see if I can even function without the teleprompter. We'll just go like electricians tape. Thank you for watching this episode. Ah, Linus Tech Tips, without me being able to see for the last 10 seconds of it. This hurts.