Western Digital Unveils Faster Mobile RAID Solution

WD has unveiled a new storage solution dedicated to creative professionals: The My Passport Pro

The latest addition to the My Passport portfolio is a departure from the rest of the product line. The company developed and designed a storage unit to simplify the lives of photographers, video makers, sound artists and other media specialists. The result is a two-HDD mobile RAID solution. While other My Passport solutions are marketed for the large majority of people, the Pro, due to some technological choices, is more of a niche product with ups and downs in the development and design.

The aluminum enclosure which contains the two drives is designed to put up with harsh conditions but cannot be opened with ease. Once the disks are full, there is no easy way to replace them or even change them for higher capacity ones. The unit comes in either 2x1TB or 2x2TB of storage, no SSD version being planned.

On the connectivity sides the solution is pretty straightforward and limited. The only cable needed for both power and data transfer is the first-gen Thunderbolt one already attached to the enclosure itself. The self-powered aspect is one of the proudest achievement of WD in this product. Even in the middle of nowhere with no power sources the My Passport Pro is usable as soon as it is plugged in to a computer. Self-powering could, on the other hand, affect performance.

While it is true that a 4TB self-powered mobile RAID solution is a pretty powerful tool, the choice of Thunderbolt 1 over the second gen technology, which came out few months ago, is quite odd for a brand-new product. The company brings up two main reason for this choice: cost, Thunderbolt 2 prices are still relatively expensive, and user base, not that many machines are equipped with Thunderbolt 2 interface.

The company has a point when it says that Thunderbolt 2 ports are not yet wildly used (only the latest Mac Pro and Retina MacBook Pro got them), But Thunderbolt 2 is backward-compatible, so the device could have been future-proof yet still usable with older machines.

The My Passport Pro can reach write at speed of up to 233Mb/s in RAID-0 and can also be configured in RAID-1 for redundancy and security.

The devices will begin to ship in early April with an MSRP of €379 for and €559 for the 4TB. It will be available at online retailers, in Apple Stores and on Western Digital’s website.