Western Digital (WD) has announced a new portable hard drive with Thunderbolt 20Gbps connectivity that can be configured with various RAID schemes.
My Passport Pro comes with hard disks and features user-selectable RAID; the drive can be configured for redundancy in RAID 1, which creates a mirror of your data, or RAID 0, which stripes data across both drives to increase performance.
The My Passport Pro is only for Mac systems. It is available in 2TB and 4TB capacities with a retail price tag of $299.99 and $429.99, respectively.
Consisting of two 2.5-inch hard drives in an aluminum enclosure, My Passport Pro has been shock-tested by WD.
The My Passport Pro
WD claims the My Passport Pro is the only dual-drive that doesn't need to be plugged into an outlet to work; the drive is powered using a computer's bus-system, like a USB-powered device.
The My Passport Pro comes with an integrated Thunderbolt cable and has performance speeds of up to 233MBps.
The Thunderbolt technology of the My Passport Pro allows a 22GB high-definition video file to be copied in half the time typically required by a USB 3.0 drive working in RAID 0 format.
"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," Jim Welsh, executive vice president of branded products and worldwide sales, said in a statement. "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."
Lucas Mearian covers consumer data storage, consumerization of IT, mobile device management, renewable energy, telematics/car tech and entertainment tech for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed. His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.
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