WD Dishes Out Pricey My Book Thunderbolt Drive

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shin0bi272

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Hitachi's 4tb 3.5" single drive is 369.00 on newegg.

a WD black 2tb is 219 (so 2 of those would be 438)

So adding the external shell for another 50-75 bucks and the thunderbolt interface is adding about a hundred bucks to the price... not really a "pricey" drive for the 10gb per channel speed you get IMHO.
 
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If you need this fast of storage. I think you will not look at the price very hard. For most consumers backing up pictures, music and video. I think USB 3 is plenty fast. People need to realize that Thunderbolt is not priced for everyone yet.
 

zaznet

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[citation][nom]house70[/nom]"It arrives in both 4 TB and 6 GB capacities, costing a hefty $599.99 and $699.99 respectively."That's the most expensive 6 GB you can find...[/citation]

Yeah I was thinking $100 per GB seemed a bit pricey too.
 

besus

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What's the point of 10 Gb/s when spinning disks will still only yield about 150 Mb/s in a RAID 0 stripe?
 

zaznet

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[citation][nom]shin0bi272[/nom]not really a "pricey" drive for the 10gb per channel speed you get IMHO.[/citation]

Given the capacity and performance relative to other storage products available the price may not be unreasonable. The problem is that the price point is high for an average consumer. This product however is not aimed to the average consumer and currently has a fairly small market of potential customers due to hardware requirements.
 

rantoc

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[citation][nom]besus[/nom]What's the point of 10 Gb/s when spinning disks will still only yield about 150 Mb/s in a RAID 0 stripe?[/citation]

Mac users won't understand that anyway, they think they have to purchase the thunderbolt as its the latest from their deity! eSata2 would have sufficed nicely (about 300mb/sec after encode) and so would Usb3.0. I dont mind WD earning money from the iSheeps thoo. Congrats!
 
[citation][nom]besus[/nom]What's the point of 10 Gb/s when spinning disks will still only yield about 150 Mb/s in a RAID 0 stripe?[/citation]
It has been a long time since 2 spinning disks only got 150 mb/sec

After PMR was released and pater densities got better, single disks will in fact push 150megabytes/sec(not for the full drive clearly).

Even Seagates newer baseline drive pushes over 150 peak and averages 140. That is a single disk.
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Don't get me wrong, USB3 would do the trick, but if they are WD Blacks the price of a enclosure ect, the overprice may be less then it appears at first glance. Then again, before the floods, a 2TB drive was cheap.
 

DRosencraft

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And this is before you tack on the price of a Thunderbolt cable, which they conveniently decided not to include, which will run you about $40-$50. If you can afford it, I guess it's not bad, but you're more than likely to be wasting money here. I would also warn that it's probably better to wait a little while longer until some of the PC manufacturers release an actual product for you to use it with. They keep saying it's coming, but we still haven't seen it. I know it's cliché now to say, and I didn't buy into it at first, but it's starting to feel more and more like the thing with FireWire. By the time Thunderbolt gets here in any meaningful way, how many people are going to still care one way or another? A lot of its features are filled well enough by other connections already (USB, HDMI), so it's going to be hard for them to replace those standards. If they can't replace them, then how much benefit are consumers going to find in Thunderbolt? I'm not trying to knock Thunderbolt, I just don't see how it would hope to have much of any future.
 

applegetsmelaid

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Would only be worth it with Raid SSDs - of course the price would jump significantly (3K+), even for just 1TB. I would expect that USB3 would be similar performance with HDDs.
 

dudemcduderson

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I agree, I wish they would have gone the SSD route. Put two 128GB in RAID 0 and you would atleast be using 550MB X 2 = 1100MB X 8 = 8.8 Giga BITS per second. Although 128GB is not THAT much space its still okay and would be wicked fast, could also be done for around $500.
 

inthere

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USB 3 and Thunderbolt RAID configs like this one are getting 300+MB/sec. There are plenty of Firewire RAID configs out there but none of them are even breaking 100 mb/sec.

I have 2 Lacie Little Big disks daisy chained for a consistant 300+MB/sec, and they're the slower TB drives. If I did the same with these WD's, I'd probably push 600 mb/sec.

Everything is lightning fast on my externals now and I'll never go back to firewire or USB 2 again. Yes they're overcharging, but you're getting huge capacity at SSD speeds
 

danwat1234

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[citation][nom]besus[/nom]What's the point of 10 Gb/s when spinning disks will still only yield about 150 Mb/s in a RAID 0 stripe?[/citation]
Exactly. I'm 95% sure the drives inside of it are Caviar Greens, maybe 130MB/s on the outer edge if your lucky, and much much less when accessing fragmented data..
USB3 is plenty for year and years for everyone except the highest end
 

rantoc

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[citation][nom]inthere[/nom]Everything is lightning fast on my externals now and I'll never go back to firewire or USB 2 again. Yes they're overcharging, but you're getting huge capacity at SSD speeds[/citation]

SSD throughput, perhaps if you raid several hdd's vs one ssd. You also get about 90x the latency from the drive mechanics alone vs SSD's nands. Same speeds... who fooled you into that? More foul marketing it seems!
 
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