Velociraptor drives get Thunderbolt boost

Western Digital's speeding disk dinosaurs, its Velociraptors, have been given a dose of Thunderbolt.

The MyBook Velociraptor Duo (MyBook VD?) pairs two of the 1TB, 10,000rpm Velociraptor drives with two Thunderbolt ports. It delivers up to 400MB/sec, close to SSD performance WD claims, which means transferring 2000 5MB images in less than 33 seconds. SSDS would respond faster to small file data requests than the Velociraptors though.

A RAID 0 (striping) arrangement can be used to maximise performance and RAID 1 (mirroring) to optimise for data protection. There is also a JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) option for Windows users on a Mac.

WD says its twin Velociraptor and Thunderbolt MyBook is a great fit with high-rez video editing, 3D rendering, graphic design and other data-hungry digital media use cases. The senior director of WD's consumer storage solutions group, Jody Bradshaw, provided a canned quote saying:

"The My Book VelociRaptor Duo is the fastest and most reliable high performance consumer storage device on the market today … Daisy-chaining multiple My Book VelociRaptor Duo devices together offers even greater speed, more capacity and flexibility.”

The My Book VD joins the existing My Book Thunderbolt Duo which contains two 2TB Caviar Green drives and pumps out up to 225MB/sec. The saurians make it go faster.

In a related announcenent WD has also added the USB 3.0 interface to its My Passport for Mac line of external drives and their maximum capacity has increased to 2TB.

A Thunderbolt cable is included with the My Book VD which is Apple Time Machine compatible and okay for use with HFS+ Journaled for Mac computers. It's £699.00 ($899.99) at the manufacturer's suggested retail price and available now at WD's online store and selected retailers. ®