Stefan Mileschin

With Thunderbolt ports available on both Macs and PCs, as well as Thunderbolt controller costs dropping thanks to the introduction of Intel's Cactus Ridge, the Thunderbolt storage space is alive and well with tons of competition. The market is full of everything from good single drive solutions, to high performance multi-drive RAID arrays. While very few drives exist that deliver the best combination of performance and value, a growing market is bound to develop some winners.

Western Digital was late to the Thunderbolt game with its My Book Thunderbolt Duo. Take two 3.5" Western Digital Caviar Green drives, toss them in a Thunderbolt version of the My Book chassis and you've got the Thunderbolt Duo. The My Book Thunderbolt Duo is good for a bit over 200MB/s of sequential IO, not tremendous by SSD standards but still ok for external storage. Today Western Digital is announcing an even higher performance model: the My Book VelociRaptor Duo. As the name implies, the VR Duo incorporates two of Western Digital's 1TB 10,000 RPM VelociRaptor hard drives in a My Book chassis. The use of higher performance drives is good for almost 400MB/s, which is better performance than we've seen from any prior two-drive Thunderbolt enclosure without resorting to using SSDs.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6216/w...tor-duo-review