Western Digital have just announced a new portable storage solution for photographers and digital content creators! The My Passport® Pro Thunderbolt Raid, the first portable, Thunderbolt™-powered dual-drive solution, comes in a 2 or 4TB flavour and has the cable built into the drive as you can see in the photographs below.
Here’s the official press release;
SYDNEY, Australia, – Mar. 28, 2014 – WD®, a Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) company, and world leader in storage solutions for the connected life, today introduced My Passport® Pro, the first portable, Thunderbolt™-powered dual-drive solution, providing creative professionals and enthusiasts high performance and capacity in a truly mobile solution. For Mac systems, My Passport Pro has user-selectable RAID functionality to deliver needed performance for the most demanding applications in the field, without the need for power adapters or extra cables. My Passport Pro is available in 2 TB and 4 TB capacities.
“The only Thunderbolt dual-drive solution that’s bus-powered, WD’s My Passport Pro enhances the workflow of mobile creative professionals by providing fast transfers and data protection for the large amounts of digital content they generate outside the studio,” said Jim Welsh, executive vice president of branded products and worldwide sales, WD. “From photographers, videographers and musicians to graphic designers and architects, people who depend on portable storage for their livelihood will find My Passport Pro defines a new level of performance, reliability and especially portability.”
“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.”
Directly powered via the integrated Thunderbolt cable — a design unique to WD — performance of My Passport Pro clocks in at speeds up to 233 MB/s, providing super-fast transfer, edit and backup capabilities. Another key feature of the dual-drive My Passport Pro is its user-selectable RAID function, which lets users choose data striping (RAID 0) for high performance or mirroring (RAID 1) for data redundancy, depending on the user’s needs. Superior to both FireWire 800 and USB 3.0, the integrated Thunderbolt technology of My Passport Pro makes video manipulation quick and easy—with the ability to copy a 22 GB high-definition video file in half the time typically required by a USB 3.0 drive working in RAID 0 format.
Consisting of two 2.5-inch hard drives housed in a sleek aluminium enclosure, My Passport Pro is thoroughly shock-tested for extra durability to perform reliably when working on the go.
Here’s what I think;
I’ve had the “My Passport Pro” for a few days now and this is by no means enough time to fully get used to working with a new device, but having worked with storage of all different kinds for so long, it’s enough to get a good feeling about something. Now I just want something to fulfill a certain storage need that I have, so I was very impressed when the WD team pulled out this little beast and handed it to me over a nice chicken schnitzel sandwich (yes, really). The build is solid with little rubber feet to keep it steady, and a fan that’s built in to keep the temperature within its working range. The fan doesn’t come on much – I’ve had the drive sitting running for a couple of days, and even under a lot of load it hasn’t activated – nice and quiet.
I have it configured to speedy Raid 0 for now, checking out the performance of the drive. The 2TB version is going to be more than enough for almost any shoot, even when setup in Raid 1 (mirrored) giving you just under 1TB of useable space. The real test of this device will be in a couple of months when I take it to Israel for a week long photo tour with Kinetis (and our very own dPS writer Oded Wagenstein) and will be writing about the drive and how it performs along the way!
The My Passport® Pro has filled a gap in my workflow and has filled it nicely – time will tell in terms of drive stability and build quality, nothing beats three copies of important content, but a mirrored raid disk in the field is a great start.
You can buy one of these little beauties on Amazon:
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