Western Digital ups capacities for the My Book Duo external HDDs to 20 TB

It’s clear that solid state drives are the future of storage, but the prices for SSD drives are still high compared to HDDs. This will not allow the external drive market to make the jump to SDDs too soon. Right now, if we would want the maximum capacity for an external drive, we could opt for the new WD My Book Duo that can store 20 TB. However, this model is almost as big as a mini PC, measuring 3.93 x 7 x 6.3 inches, so there might be some issues in the portability department.

The latest My Book Duo comes with two WD Red 10 TB 7,200 RPM drives configured in a RAID 0 matrix by default. They can be switched to RAID 1 or run in regular JBOD (just a bunch of disks) mode. WD claims that the two drives can reach sequential read speeds of up to 360 MB/s in RAID 0.

The new external drive has security features like 256-bit AES hardware encryption and password protection. It is NTFS formatted, making it compatible with Windows 7/8/8.1/10 out of the box, and it ships with proprietary data management software, such as WD Backup, WD Security and WD Drive Utilities. On the connectivity side, the new My Book Duo is equipped with one USB 3.1 Type-C port and two USB 3.0 Type-A ports. This means the drive can act as a hub for other USB peripherals, and you can even recharge mobile devices through it.

The new 20 TB version will be available starting September 6 for US$800, directly from the WD site. This might not be worth it, since two separate WD Red 10 TB drives cost around $560.

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