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

Product Information

To make these devices more useful, WD needs to consider adding a third drive and an SSD slot for caching. Because merely making the drives bigger each cycle doesn’t solve any of the problems associated with using these, and realistically each new greater capacity makes them less flexible and more challenging to manage. If you need to get to the two drives, then the top of the box can be removed. It’s just push fit, and with a flat head screwdriver, it’s easy enough to pop off the top.

Having massive amounts of storage capacity attached to your system isn’t much use if it’s slow to access.

Features

Use the setup software, if it has not been attempted already. The software can be found in the Online Learning Center. The reality is that curating 22TB or 44TB of data on the Duo is a significant exercise. Transferring it on and off can’t be done at a whim, and the thought of losing that much data through hardware failure is terrifying. Although it optimises the drive, it’s not a great solution for secure storage as I need something that is as robust as possible.

Incidentally, you can also set the unit to JBOD (which stands for ‘just a bunch of drives’), where each drive becomes a single volume/logical drive. We’re not sure why you might want to go this route, as it offers no redundancy against drive failure (like mirroring) or performance benefits (striping). But anyway, the option is there. The portly pachyderm in this room is how long it would take you to fill the drive from data existing on the host system. Assuming the AJA System Test results are roughly accurate, the transfer times are somewhat scary. And, by providing a solution where the drives are accessible, your storage solution can be repaired if a drive fails, or be upgraded to larger capacity storage when you need that. External hard drives have come along way in a short time, and while the drives themselves have changed little, the technology and software around them have advanced at speed. Once it appears, it will show as with any other hard drive that you plug into your system. But, before you get started, it needs to be configured for your use and system.

Introduction

If after those steps were unable to provide access to the Dashboard, there are a few things that can be attempted: With this configuration, the two disks inside the My Book Duo are treated as independent hard drives (each one has its own drive letter). With My Book Duo, you only need one USB cable to access both drives.