Drive Speed of WD Portable RAID storage

<p>I have noted an ad thru Photo Net of a Western Digital Thunderbolt RAID drive. The ad states:<br /> "Powered by an integrated Thunderbolt cable for true portability and speeds as high as 233 MB/s for the most demanding applications, it's easier than ever to keep your creativity moving."<br /> What it does not state is the hard drive speed. I see it appears to have 2 laptop drives. I looked at WD Thunderbolt drives some time ago; but decided against them as the ones I saw only had 5400RPM drives. <br /> If these drives advertised have similar speeds, the claimed benefit of TB would be exaggerated. So I would be very interested to know what the drive speed of the new WD Portable RAID storage is?<br /><br />Has anyone out there used them?</p>

<p>http://www.amazon.com/Passport-portable-integrated-Thunderbolt-WDBRNB0040DBK-NESN/dp/B00ITI0514/ref=sr_1_1/175-7180349-2888341?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1406822454&sr=1-1&keywords=raid+external+hard+drive<br>

<br />233 Mb/s is bits not bytes, and probably refers to the RAID 0 configuration. That translates to 29 MB/s, which is slower than my single WD Passport drive in USB3 (55 MB/s).</p>

<p>I have a couple of 2T WD Passport USB3 drives in Case Logic semi-rigid containers. That's more than enough to collect many day's photos in the field. I take the added precaution of burning dailies on Blu-Ray discs, also in a Case Logic holder.</p>

<p>I think your money is better spent transferring photos from a simple portable drive to a RAID 1/2 or DROBO 5D (or N) drive at home, which holds up to 5 3T drives with a dual Thunderbolt/USB3 interface. The DROBO is not quite a RAID, but in many ways more useful, since you can add or hot swap drives at will.</p>

<p>The 233 number refers to Thunderbolt's theoretical speed. With modern hard drives there is virtual no speed advantage with a RAID these days unless you string 4 drives together. And then it is minimal. Every time you add a drive to a RAID you increase the percentage of possible loss by a huge margin. Better to get a single drive in an enclosure. It's far better if you buy it from a computer supplier, like OWC or ExtremePC, vs some place like Costco. RAID is generally a bad idea unless you are mirroring, or have a high end SCSI device.</p>

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<p>If these drives advertised have similar speeds, the claimed benefit of TB would be exaggerated.</p>

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<p> <br>

Every benchmark I have seen shows that Thunderbolt offers little to no advantage over USB3 with rotating media. You do get to pay a lot more though, and that makes some people feel better. Thunderbolt provides a speed advantage with SSDs.</p>

<i>"Every time you add a drive to a RAID you increase the percentage of possible loss by a huge margin."</i><br><br>How so, Lenny?<br>RAID is a way to distribute data over multiple disks, decreasing the percentage of possible loss.<br>RAID 0, by the way, means 0 Redundancy, i.e. not really RAID.<br>How many drives to add to a RAID depends on what type of RAID you are building. In RAID 1 drives go in pairs.