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back to article Western Digital hauls out weighty tome with 20TB external storage

Western Digital has bundled a pair of slow Red drives into a My Book Duo external storage product, using RAID to get the speed up. It has an up to 20TB capacity rating, massive, and great for digital content storage and/or backup. Sven Rathjen, VP of product marketing, Client Solutions, said: "We see it within new content …

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  1. choleric

    Three year warranty

    A five year warranty would run the risk of cutting the legs out from under the nice secondary market that is the backup of the the backup. A three year warranty makes sure that enough people are nervous enough to buy two sets, in case one breaks.

    RAID1 despite costing you 50% of your storage space doesn't quite offer the protection in this configuration that many assume. Essentially you have two identical disks coming off the assembly line around the same time, being subjected to identical environmental conditions, and similar workloads. The chances of them both failing around the same time are higher than for non-identical disks. RAID1 only offers protection for one disk failing. If both go you're scuppered. The only way to avoid this happening is to open up the new device and hit one of the drives with a hammer/luser hard enough that it will fail first by a safe margin, but not hard enough to break it! Most people prefer not to do this.

    So you need a backup of the backup. Hence the three year warranty to underline that requirement.

    That being said, I'd still prefer five years :)

    7 4 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Three year warranty

      1 year, 5 years or 50 years. If you lose the disks, you lose the disks. Warranty or not.

      5 1 Reply
    2. Alan Brown Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Three year warranty

      "A three year warranty makes sure that enough people are nervous enough to buy two sets, in case one breaks."

      If you don't have _at least_ 2 physically separate(*) backup copies of your data at all times(**), then you're not doing it properly.

      (*) RAID1 is not a backup system.

      (**) in practice this means at least 3 sets of media to run a G-F-S cycle.

      8 0 Reply
    3. DJ Smiley
      Reply Icon

      Re: Three year warranty

      Or just remember that RAID is not a backup, and neither is something you can write to as easily as this.

      A backup is secure (i.e not accessible accidentally), remote, and duplicated to separate locations.

      1 0 Reply
  2. Mr Sceptical
    Stop

    RAID 0 - really?

    So you've got 20TB of storage - how many people are going to use this as a cache and how many will consider it permanent storage?

    My guess is most will be the latter and will then be totally gutted when one drive hiccups and they lose 20 TB of data!!

    RAID 1 or JBOD are the only viable choices for me unless you need a ridiculously big external cache drive. At that point you might as well put them inside a PC so this is only really useful for laptop based video creators or Mac users (how many extra drives can you install in most Macs?)

    My review: Meh.

    4 0 Reply
    1. Alan Brown Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: RAID 0 - really?

      "RAID 1 or JBOD are the only viable choices for me"

      Phone me when RAID systems become immune to inadvertent deletions.

      1 0 Reply
      1. hmv
        Reply Icon

        Re: RAID 0 - really?

        You haven't been keeping up to date; many storage systems (such as ZFS) offer snapshots for exactly that reason.

        2 0 Reply
  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    RAID-1 won't make it faster...

    .... while RAID-0 will just make it more risky.

    RAID-1 on fast disks is OK as "workspace" area which allows to keep on working if one of the disk fails, but which is obviously backed up to a reliable storage. Anyway, RAID-1 may be better then nothing if more disks hinder moving the enclosure around easily.

    RAID-0 is useful only when a large space and speed needs trumps everything else - and contents can be reloaded as needed.

    Also, even if the USB port is an hub, you can't download directly from a digital camera (and usually you can download faster directly from the card).

    0 2 Reply
  4. Potemkine! Silver badge

    Thanks to the recording industry...

    and the tax for "private copy" it succeeded to lobby to our corrupted lawmakers, the My Book Duo / 20 TB has a price over €1,200 in France when it cost €740 in Germany.

    It does not stop recording mafia industry to fight the so-called "piracy" of course, through an government agency paid also by taxpayers...

    Should I add I hate the recording mafia industry?

    5 2 Reply
    1. HobartTas
      Reply Icon

      Re: Thanks to the recording industry...

      Perhaps you might want to consider storing your data using LTO drives and accessing the data on the tapes using LTFS which appear to be completely free from the tax you mentioned according to how I read this document http://www.copiefrance.fr/files/Tariffs_ENG_2017.pdf.

      0 0 Reply
  5. earl grey
    Trollface

    I would cry if i lost that much pron

    I mean data...yeah, that's it.

    3 0 Reply
    1. JEDIDIAH
      Reply Icon
      Linux

      Re: I would cry if i lost that much pron

      Re-ripping 2000 plus disks would be painful and unpleasant. I would rather not do that. That's why I have 2 arrays.

      1 1 Reply
  6. InfiniteApathy
    Flame

    Warranty?

    Stuff the warranty, plan according to what the data is worth.

    3 0 Reply
  7. jake Silver badge

    Personally ...

    ... for backup purposes, I use tape.

    2 1 Reply
  8. Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

    Ripped this thing to shreds on google plus as well.

    It just is not worth it. But expect a lot of people buying, because "...what the hey, 20Tb is more than enough for all mah pr0... errrr... Linux distros"

    and

    "RAID-1 as backup strategy is secure enough. Order one for the office, Doris dear, and let Tim set it up so that we can store all our critical documents on it. I'm not going to purchase a server, they are too bloody expensive. We don't need all that fancy RAID6 stuff."

    and expect an On-Call post detailing woes and tribulations with this kind of b0rked WD NAS chock and block full of critical and sensitive information that absolutely must be recovered - on a RAID0 volume.

    Nah, I'll rather spend some $$$ and get a proper NAS with iSCSI support.

    1 0 Reply
  9. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

    USB-ethernet adaptor?

    This could be useful (in the garage) as something outside the house for backup - but it would need to be able to use a USB->Ethernet adaptor..

    0 0 Reply
  10. Lord_Beavis
    Linux

    False advertising

    Buy a real backup solution. You'll be happier if you ever have to recover data.

    0 0 Reply

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