Conclusion

With so many choices in the marketplace, external hard disk drives have become somewhat of a commodity, differentiated mainly by storage capacity and price. Hence, branded manufacturers like Seagate and Western Digital try to differentiate their products by offering value-added features like faster interfaces, E-labels and backup and encryption capabilities.

The Western Digital My Passport Pro 2 TB (WDBRMP0020DBK) is no exception. It represents Western Digital's first foray into portable RAID arrays. Its chunky case conceals two 9.5 mm mobile hard disk drives which allow the My Passport Pro to be configured as :

• a 2 TB RAID 0 drive (in Stripe mode for maximum capacity and performance),
• a 1 TB RAID 1 drive (in Mirror mode for maximum data protection), or
• two 1 TB independent drives (in JBOD mode for maximum storage capacity).

This is the kind of flexibility that no other portable drive offers. Of course, most users are just going to select one of the two RAID modes and stick with it for the lifetime of the drive.

Although Western Digital touts the RAID 0 mode as offering maximum capacity and performance, hence its default mode, the RAID 0 mode also offers the least data protection. In fact, you are twice as likely to lose all of your data with RAID 0 than you are with a single drive. That's why many My Passport Pro users will probably switch to the RAID 1 mode, which sacrifices half the storage capacity to ensure that any data that's written to the drive is protected. In the event one of the two drives inside the My Passport Pro fails, you can still read all of your data off the second drive.

The integrated Thunderbolt cable is both a boon and a potential problem. It is an elegant solution that ensures you will never forget to bring the cable while allowing for compact storage that also provides a better grip for the user. On the other hand, if the cable fails, the drive is rendered useless and must be shipped back to Western Digital for the cable to be replaced.

As far as performance is concerned, well, it truly is phenomenal. It's physically impossible to obtain such a high throughput without using such a dual-drive design in RAID 0. So if you are looking for maximum throughput, you cannot go wrong with the My Passport Pro. The only downside to the design is the increased thermal output, which Western Digital solved by equipping the My Passport Pro with a smart fan that spins up when it gets too toasty inside.

However, we have to question the use of Thunderbolt, instead of the far more common USB 3.0 interface. While the Thunderbolt interface is certainly much faster - twice that of USB 3.0, the My Passport Pro would have worked just as well with a USB 3.0 interface. While it is very fast, it's not fast enough to require a Thunderbolt interface. Using the USB 3.0 interface would have allowed the drive to be used with Windows-based computers as well, so the decision to use a Thunderbolt interface is puzzling indeed.

Look for the lowest current prices on Western Digital My Passport Pro external USB 3.0 hard disk drives in Amazon or Pricegrabber!

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