Finding yourself constantly running out of space on your Mac? Western Digital may have a solution for you, as the data storage giant has begun to ship a Thunderbolt-compatible hard drive rack with support for up to 12TB of external hard drive space.
Dubbed the My Book Pro, WD’s new hard drive rack combines two hard drive variants of your choosing, with the option of either 3, 4, 5, or 6 terabytes and bolstering an input option of either 20Gbps Thunderbolt or 5Gbps USB 3.0. By default, the device is set to RAID-0 in order to make full use of the higher storage options, but can manually be configured to RAID-1 or JBOD if preferred. RAID-1, however, does not support multiple drives so, in doing so, the capacity would be split in half.
“The My Book Pro device has been designed from the ground up for the creative professional workflow,” writes Western Digital marketing VP Sven Rathjen. “We’ve been able to take the newest, highest capacity 6 TB 7200 RPM drives on the market and marry them with leading technologies to deliver a product you can leverage from the moment you connect it.”
Inhibiting the forefront of the My Book Pro are two USB 3.0 ports towards the front of the device, acting as a USB input hub and allowing users to connect devices to the hard drive deck and in turn connecting them to the host computer. On the back of the drive reside a couple of Thunderbolt ports, allowing users to daisy chain up to six My Book Pros, in addition to another USB 3.0 port.
Though it’s not clear which drives are bundled with the My Book Pro, the press release mentions a rotation frequency of 7,200 rpm, and considering WD just launched a few higher-capacity versions of the Red Pro, it seems like the obvious choice here. The My Book Pro is available from Western Digital’s official website or from a number of other retailers at $599 (6TB), $749 (8TB), $899 (10TB), or $999 (12TB) depending on storage configuration options.
