WD My Book Thunderbolt Duo 6TB External Dual Hard Drive Storage with RAID

I ordered this drive with the hopes of capturing HD footage of video games using a Macbook Pro and a Black Magic Intensity Extreme. While new and pricey, I won't knock a review score purely on something being expensive. It has worked flawlessly, as the read/write speeds are accomplishing my needs. I tried to use a Firewire 800 setup but it just was not fast enough. The drive showed 3.65TB usable, kind of a bummer, but it runs very cool and quiet and does not go into a sleep/standby mode like I have read in reviews for other similar devices.I have it daisy-chained via Thunderbolt with the Intensity Extreme and both products are working flawlessly.The utility software it comes with is also simple and gets the job done, allowing you to change RAID configuration.

The drive itself is really quiet. The setup is simple and fast. I use this drive as a backup drive with my MacBook Pro using TimeMachine. I therefore configured the drive for RAID 1 mode, mirroring of data (disks). The goal is obvious, if one drive fails you still have access to your data on the mirrored drive. If a drive fails you can rebuild the other drive...This is what happened just 1 day after I purchased the drive. Drive A failed and the software shows the drive as "degraded" and starts the rebuild process.The problem with this drive isa) rebuild of a drive takes more than 2 days (two!, not a typo)b) your MacBook needs to stay connected during the entire rebuild process (> 2 days)!c) during the rebuild process you can not reboot your MAC...rebuild will start all over again.Not being able to take my MacBook Laptop with me for 2 days or not being able to take it even into another room is a show stopper for me.So, I called technical support. They claim it will take 2 days to rebuild a drive. In my initial test rebuilding 6% of the drive took 8 hours...you can do the math....The G-Drive disk I used before had a hardware RAID controller build in, rebuild just takes ~ 4 hours for 1 TB without! the requirement to be connected to the MacBook.Update: July 20, 201220% Rebuild of the drive took 27h27% 37hoursthus complete rebuild will take 5days and 15 hours.

I used this for iMovie backups. I have 10 years of home video of my 3 kids, imported them all from tapes and eventually ran out of room on my 2TB Mac, so waited for a "reasonable" priced thunderbolt drive to hold the large files (a lot of it is very large HD video). I backed everything up and it was so, so fast, and quiet and impressive. I was thrilled until a week or two later it disappeared from the Mac - couldn't find it in IMovie, Finder, Disk Utility, etc. It just completely disappeared. WD support has been very nice and courteous and prompt (almost no holding time on a Sunday afternoon), but believes the drive died and told me to return it through Amazon since it has been less than 30 days. Fortunately the only files I didn't delete were also backed up to another WD firewire drive, so will try another thunderbolt and will ALWAYS keep a couple backups.

The Thunderbolt Duo 6 is currently retailing for around $600, which makes it incredibly frustrating that this thing doesn't come with the necessary part to make it functional: a thunderbolt cable. Yes, this might be the one drive in the world that doesn't come with the cable you need to connect it to the computer. When you sell an item at this price point, it should be treated as a luxury item and come with all the bells and whistles you will need. I'd rather they tacked $30 on the price and included the cable.Yes, I realize it says in the description that the cable is sold separately, but why?! Every other drive I've ever purchased (dozens) has come with a cable, so forgive me for not double checking the description to see if I'd need to buy any additional parts.Very frustrating. That said, the drive looks nice and has very nice rubber feet so that it won't scratch up your desk.