WD My Book VelociRaptor Duo review: WD My Book VelociRaptor Duo

The new My Book VelociRaptor Duo drive that WD announced today is basically a combination of the company's previous My Book Thunderbolt Duo and its cream-of-the-crop VelociRaptor hard drives, which are arguably the fastest consumer-grade hard drives on the market.

8.4

WD My Book VelociRaptor Duo

The Good

The <b>WD My Book VelociRaptor Duo</b> offers stellar performance, includes a Thunderbolt cable, and is easy to service.

The Bad

The My Book VelociRaptor Duo doesn't offer any other connection types and is relatively pricey.

The Bottom Line

The My Book VelociRaptor Duo is one of the best storage devices thanks to its balanced combination of excellent performance, practical design, and relatively friendly pricing.

That said, if the Thunderbolt Duo is budget-friendly and flexible in terms of capacity, the VelociRaptor Duo comes in a fixed 2TB capacity and costs noticeably more: $900.

To make up for the higher price, the drive includes a 3-foot-long Thunderbolt cable; with the Thunderbolt Duo and most other Thunderbolt drives, you have to shell out another $50 to get your own cable. And, most importantly, the drive was superfast in my testing. In fact it's by far the fastest dual-bay Thunderbolt drive among those I've worked with.

The fact that it uses hard drives instead of solid-state drives (SSDs) means that it's the perfect fit for professional digital-content editing applications, where the demand for both high-speed and lots of data-overwriting are required. Unlike SSDs, hard drives don't suffer from the limited program-erase cycles. (Read more about P/E cycles and the SSDs here.)

If you're a professional in the market for a noncompromising storage device that costs less than $1,000, look no further than the My Book VelociRaptor Duo.

Design and features