Western Digital has enabled massive external storage for desktop, notebook and workstation users with a 44TB dual-drive My Book product.
The My Book product line is used to backup desktop files and folders as well as acting as a central store for data from smart devices such as digital cameras. It is also found in small office/home office environments.
My Book Pro single drive and twin drive systems arrived in 2006 as desktop and small office/home office external file storage systems. They provided remote access over the internet as well as local access and had miserly 500GB and 1TB capacities respectively. There were later My Cloud Home and Home Duo variants providing a home NAS which synced with other devices for storing, streaming and sharing across an internet connection. Twin drive My Book systems could be used as two separate drives: as a faster and combined logical drive with data striped across the two disks in a RAID 0 setup, or a single logical drive in a RAID 1 mirroring scheme.
Capacities were steadily uprated as the component SATA disk drives went from generation to generation. By August 2017 there were 4, 6, 8, 12, 16 and 20TB capacities in the Duo configuration, using WD Red 5,400rpm disk drives. WD’s Red Pro drives now extend to the 22TB capacity level from a 2TB start point. And the USB 3.2 gen 1-connected My Book product reaches that level too, from a 4TB starter priced at $99.99, through 6, 8, 12, 14, 16 and 18TB variants to the 22TB range topper at $599.99. That’s a 44x capacity increase in 17 years. What capacity level will we see in another 17 years?
The dual-drive My Book Duo starts at $439.99 for 16TB, and goes through 20, 24, 28 and 36TB capacity points to reach the giddy heights of 44TB for $1,499.99, 2.5x the single drive product’s price. It can be used as two independent drives, like a twin disk JBOD, or as a single RAID 1 device for redundancy, but not RAID 0.
WD notes the average US household has more than 10 smart devices, such as portable SSDs and HDDs, memory cards and USB flash drives. Product management VP Susan Parks said: “With multiple devices used in our everyday life, we have the ability to instantly create, consume and generate massive amounts of content.” The new high-capacity My Books can be used to backup personal devices or an entire household’s devices.
In June 2021, WD suffered a bug and customers’ My Book Live NAS devices were reset over the cloud and files made inaccessible. This fault has been fixed.
WD’s announcement quotes John Rydning, an IDC research VP: “While many people rely on the cloud, we know consumers are looking for local storage at their fingertips to help them preserve and readily control their growing amount of personal and business data.”
Get a My Book datasheet here and a My Book Duo datasheet here.
Both products are available at select Western Digital retailers, etailers and on the Western Digital store.
