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  • cknobman - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link

    $900 LMAO kiss my @ss WD!
  • Luscious - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link

    I tend to agree. You could get a 2-drive NAS for half the price and double the storage that offers more features and better functionality. I can't really think of too many scenarios where 200MB/s transfer speeds to an external drive matter enough to make this product attractive at the price it's going for.
  • nathanddrews - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link

    Is the target market a video editing scratch disk for thunderbolt-equipped laptop owners with small HDDs or SSDs? I can't think of another scenario where I would store data externally in a RAID-0...
  • SodaAnt - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link

    I don't think you need a 2TB scratch disk.
  • DukeN - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link

    $900 is quite a bit of money for external storage, especially when you can buy a TeraByte of internal SSD for less.

    Nathandrews, why would a laptop owner be bogged down by adding a peripheral by this? Would they not be better off just having a desktop?

    The only people buying this will be ones with disposable $$ not knowing any better (Bestbuy says Hai).
  • eric appla - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link

    I had people comming into recording sessions who were probably the right custommers for this
    These were US based film industry companies and they had their macbooks PRO and external storage for all the source material. (at the time Firewire800)
    We were re-recording with orchestra what they had precompiled using samplers (Video + about 20 - 40 independent tracks) to headphones of individual players to hear their parts
    Throughput wasn't problem as video was cca 5 MB/sec and 40 channels of 44.1/16 were only 3.5MB/s but as the SW had to access all the different files at the start to sync i was not working and we had to copy everything over to internal HDD
    At the time they'd pay loads to have better IO random speeds on their external storage because the delays caused by us waiting for their external drives to copy material over was wasting their dearly paid studio time. But tbh any thunderbolt storage will do the trick at the time
  • bobsmith1492 - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link

    Sounds like a pretty small market. :-)
  • demani - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link

    Yes, but it is a lucrative one. Since many of the material costs get passed on to the clients or are used directly for making money (i.e. not just storing photos at home) it can be easier to justify the cost of something like this.
  • Solandri - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link

    Couldn't you duplicate the performance of this 10,000 RPM 2x1TB RAID 0 device with a 5400 RPM 4x500 GB RAID 0 device for considerably less?

    I mean you're already going with RAID 0 so obviously reliability isn't that big a concern. And if physical size or random access speeds were a concern you'd go for a bunch of SSDs. The only use I can see for this device is if the most important factors for you are sustained read/writes >300 MB/s and 2 TB of capacity.
  • Alexvrb - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link

    For sequential speeds, sure. Slower spindle speeds can't touch the 10k drives on access time, random speeds. Only thing better is an SSD, but if you need capacity AND speed, the VR drives aren't bad. Also having 4 drives would make the box go from big to HUGE, and assuming you're using reliable 5400RPM drives that are as tough as the VRs, you're still looking at twice the potential for a failure.

    Of course they're charging a steep premium for the enclosure/package. I'd like to see a competitor buy Velociraptors in bulk and then turn around and undercut them by a hundred bucks (for the whole enclosure, I mean). I mean even street price you can get a 1TB VR for $260.
  • Death666Angel - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link

    So it sound like they needed SSDs in there? I'm pretty sure a normal 512GB SDD connected via USB3 would have done the trick. If only TB is available, use that then. But the VelociRaptors only make sense when you are doing large sequential reads/writes. Unless I misunderstood you. :)
  • mavere - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link

    Are you really having a tough time imagining scenarios for portable, fast storage? Really?
  • DukeN - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link

    I'm having a tough time imagining scenarios for OVERPRICED portable, fast storage.

    In the era of $400 512GB SSDs, $900 for thermally enclosed SATA HDs that are known to have low MTBFs is asking for trouble.

    Only a matter of time til someone puts an SSD version of this out that is half the size, and half the power consumption with double the performance. For this target market, they'll happily pay double the price too.
  • demani - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link

    Because taking a tower on a plane is really a pain. this and a laptop would fit in your carry-on along with a change of clothes and a toilet kit.
  • ExarKun333 - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link

    The cost here is insane...
  • Golgatha - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link

    Completely insane.
  • jaydee - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link

    I read the review until I got to the cost, then I stopped reading, there's no point to this device at $900.
  • demani - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link

    Maybe no cost at home, but there is certainly a benefit to certain people and use cases. It's not for you, fine. But you aren't everyone.
  • twotwotwo - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link

    Seems like it's optimal for fewer people and use cases than it used to be, because of pressure from SSDs from the high end and cheaper externals on the low end, now that the cheap ones have faster connectivity than before and there are lots of less-expensive RAID options.

    From Anand's charts, the My Book Thunderbolt--same setup, slower drives--can still move a quarter gig each second, and you get 4x the storage per buck. So, if I were a video editor, I'd get a cheap (well, "cheap") external and load up on Flash--try to get enough SSD space to hold whatever projects I'm actively working on, with HDDs as the enormous (and tolerably fast) archive.

    Not that _no_ one can use this--just that even the folks who need high-end setups might want a different kind of high-end setup these days.
  • andrewaggb - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link

    I think anandtech may need to look at highlighting articles in a different color or something to indicate the target market.

    This is clearly a professional class device, and not a consumer device. They've done some enterprise/server reviews as well that people are offended by the huge price tags. I find them interesting, even if I don't always have a personal or professional use for it, but clearly from the comments many people are bothered that they click on a review for a product that wouldn't interest them.
  • psyq321 - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link

    And since when is something with WD VelociRaptor considered a "professional device" ? Last time I've checked, those HDD-s were just overpriced toys for overclockers and such.

    Putting those toys in a portable and thermally limited enclosure is just asking for trouble - they will fail, and then some. For professional content editing this might not be a problem as the storage is just temporary - but then, why bother with the moving parts when $3.2K is buying you 2 TB of completely silent, shockproof SSDs, which are smaller, lighter and quite a good deal faster in RAID0 than anything those 'raptors can do.
  • Holler - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link

    Can someone please remind WD this isn't the 1990's anymore?
  • Makaveli - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link

    lol 90s were great much better music!
  • Roland00Address - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link

    That said ever since the Intel x25m came out in 2008 there have been little use for the raptors.
  • kpb321 - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link

    If you compare the pricing of this model it really isn't any worse than that of the regular MyBook Duo. A pair of 1tb velociraptors on newegg is ~500$ and a pair of 3gb green drives is ~300$. The My Book VelociRaptor Duo is 200$ more expensive than MyBook Duo which matches up to the price difference in the drives. Yeah the price per gigabyte is much higher but your paying for the speed. For this to be worth it you have to need more speed than typical green or 7200rmp drives can manage and more space than can be reasonably obtained in a SSD. Not necessarily a large market but not completely non-existent.
  • madmilk - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link

    The point is, Velociraptors are overpriced these days. The primary benefit of 10K rpm hard drives is for lower seek times, NOT for sequential access, since 7200rpm drives are generally denser and thus make up for slower platters. But with SSDs costing less than 100% more, while having 100x the random IO speed, there is little reason to dump money into these hot and loud disks, unless you write so much that you'll wear out MLC.
  • pandemonium - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link

    As much as I love how reliable my WDs have been and the performance from my VRs in past and present, the market for them is just dead. This just seems like WD is trying to sell their unsold, stationary stock of VRs in another format...and for a premium at that.

    Oh well, there's always suckers out there to spend money on anything that appears to be a niche item.
  • Gonemad - Friday, August 31, 2012 - link

    ... would go on more 500GB units in the same RAID-0 setup achieving more performance, and keeping everything else equal. 4x 500GB...

    Of course, someone would have to do the math to narrow it down.

    On the other hand, wouldn't a couple of SSDs deliver more performance, in a smaller package, for waaaay more money? People that want performance, and size, usually is willing to pay the price.
  • random2 - Sunday, September 2, 2012 - link

    What I find frustrating about all this, is the fact that we had some very good high speed solutions for years, (USB 3 and e-SATA) and few if any of the manufacturers got on the band wagon to address the problem of slow external storage! They stuck to their guns, supplying storage with USB-2, connectivity and leaving faster solutions available only to those who would shell out the additional money for mult-drive storage or NAS units. Even these were often supplied with only ethernet RJ45 connection.
    Now Thunderbird has come along and gotten a fair amount of press, like all of a sudden they have just discovered hi transfer rates are possible with external drives!

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