14 DAY TRIAL // The My Passport brand is one that Western Digital has long used as a label for its portable hard disk drive collection. Now that collection has expanded to include Thunderbolt-enabled dual-drives.
This isn't the first time that Western Digital releases a dual-drive. It is also not the first time when WD launches a Thunderbolt-based portable drive.
It is the first time the company puts Thunderbolt on a dual-drive though. The first time anyone combined those two features in fact.
And because of the RAID technology, the two drives are seen as a single product by the operating system of whatever PC or Apple Mac system you connect the item to.
Selecting RAIS 0 will prioritize performance, but RAID 1 will focus more on data redundancy, safety in case of power cuts or whatever else.
The top performance is of 233 MB/s, which would not be possible on a single HDD, even over Thunderbolt.
In case you haven't already guessed, the two HDDs are both 2.5-inch units. Otherwise, the My Passport Pro would not qualify as a portable drive, only as an external one.
Moving on, the aluminum enclosure should provide some measure of shock resistance. WD has even tested it.
But don't think the WD My Passport Pro will survive all that much abuse though. Ultimately, the drives inside are still made of magnetic platters and a sharp head for reading, which will ruin the disks if it comes into actual contact with them. So dropping or bashing the thing with a mallet is ill advised.
It would have been different if the newcomer had SSDs inside instead of HDDs, since those lack moving parts and, thus, are naturally more enduring. That would have made the price skyrocket though, and the capacity plummet.
Speaking of which, there are 2 TB and 4 TB Western Digital My Passport Pro storage devices for sale, through Apple and major consumer electronics retailers and e-tailers (not counting WD's own web store of course). The former has a price of $299.99 / €299.99, the latter of $429.99 / €429.99.
To put things into perspective in regard to the performance, a 22 GB video file should be copied to either drive in half the time it would take the USB 3.0 interface to move the data (with the drives also working in RAID 0).
"Thunderbolt technology makes new approaches possible for high-performance workflows," said Jason Ziller, Intel's director of Thunderbolt marketing.
"By combining dual storage drives on a portable, bus-powered device, the My Passport Pro from WD is a uniquely powerful storage solution with high capacity for today's demanding users."