USB 3.0 offers sustained data transfer rates of 5Gb/s, which is equivalent to 625MB/s. Unless you need blistering speeds, you can get great performance for compressed HD video work and photo editing and management work out of the USB 3.0 options. I was thrilled with those speeds at the time, but the USB 3.0 options are now up to par with RAID configurations. When I ran the same test on the WD 6TB My Book Thunderbolt Duo configured in RAID 0, I saw around 230MB/s read and 240MB/s write speeds. That is as good as or better than the comparable WD Thunderbolt drives I have tested in the past. I get around 290MB/s read speed and 233MB/s write speeds out of the WD 8TB My Book Duo drive over USB 3.0, which is what you see from the screen shot above using Blackmagic’s Disk Speed Test utility. Notably, the current price is $200 cheaper than its Thunderbolt counterpart – the WD 8TB My Book Thunderbolt Duo. It has been available at $349.99 for several months now – down from its retail price tag of $419.99. The performance of this drive is fantastic when you consider the price it costs to jump up to comparable Thunderbolt storage. However, I use it in a Mac environment and it was very simple to reformat it for Mac OS X. It is a USB 3.0 interface and comes pre-formatted in NTFS for Windows. It can be configured in RAID 0, 1 or as a JBOD drive. The WD 8TB My Book Duo external hard drive is one of the bigger dual drives in the My Book line (but there’s also a 12TB version).
