Review on High Performance Thunderbolt 4TB My Book RAID External Hard Drive - WDBUTV0040JSL-NESN by Stephen Cernatescu

Updated September 9, 2015 Last updated. Just wanted to let everyone know that there is a way to encrypt a RAID volume without purchasing the app. Instructions can be found here http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/81504/why-doesnt-filevault-work-on-a-raid-volume---------------- - ------------------Update January 27, 2015 I am writing this update as a public announcement that the Error Correction Disk or TLER is not as easy as I thought. I had a gut feeling that I should learn more about Western Digital Red drives before spending around $200 on a pair, and I'm glad I did. So what have I discovered? Are Western Digital Red drives suitable for a 2-drive enclosure? Simple answer: if you use RAID 1, yes. If you use RAID 0, no. The long answer I found on the forum is: The reason you don't need TLER in RAID 0 is that TLER is designed so that when a drive in a RAID array encounters a bad sector, instead of keep trying to read a sector, the drive spits out after 7 seconds and tells the RAID controller to handle the error. The controller then finds a redundant copy of that sector's data from another drive in the array (with RAID levels 1 or 10) or calculates the missing data from the parity information (RAID levels 4, 5, and 6). The problem with TLER in RAID 0 is that there is no redundant copy of the data anywhere and it cannot be calculated by parity since there is no parity. You need a hard drive to keep trying to recover data from a bad sector because, for better or for worse, that's the only copy you have. Therefore, TLER is bad in RAID 0. Now I understand why Western Digital is giving us green drives with this case. Green drives work well in RAID 0, RAID 1, or as individual drives occupying 1 enclosure, while red drives are ideal only when the enclosure works with RAID 1. Right now I'm considering leaving the green drives that come with the case because I expect any performance gain I could get from replacing with black drives (Western Digital performance category) will be offset by the fact that I encrypt my data. If I ever decide to upgrade to RAID 1 I will be swapping the greens for the reds. This TLER function seems to be very useful when used properly. -------- -------------- ----------------------- Updated 23 July 2014 No problems so far. RAID 0 still works, did you find a solution for encryption? Yes. For those of you who insist on encrypting your data, give Knox a try. It is made by the same company that makes the 1Password password manager app. Agile bits. At the time of updating this review, it is not available on the App Store. Trying to encrypt the entire volume while running RAID 0 will not work. However, you can create a vault and store all your information in it. Unlike TrueCrypt, which forced you to set a container file size limit up front, Knox gives you the freedom to create a vault that can grow in size as information is added. You can set a maximum size to take up the entire drive if you want, and it won't take up that much space until you put that much data into storage. You also have the option of using 128-bit or 256-bit encryption. But how has Knox impacted performance? It reduced performance, but not as much as TrueCrypt. I had a write speed of around 90MB/s and a read speed of around 130MB/s. Don't worry if you need or just want the security of encryption. --------------------------------------------- -12. July 2014 I've only had this product for 3 days so these are my first thoughts and impressions. what did i get I ordered a 4TB model. I received a suitcase with two green Western Digital 2TB drives, a power cable and a 30cm Thunderbolt cable. That's right, it comes with a Lightning cable. I wish I knew because another review on this product says it doesn't include a lightning cable so I spent $39 for one. User friendliness? super easy. I'm using a 2011 iMac with Mavericks. I plugged the case in and it was recognized immediately. I also noticed that by default it was configured to use a Green Disk RAID 0Western Digital? Yes. Western Digital has different types of hard drives for different purposes, and they differentiate their product lines by color coding. I looked up what the green codes mean. On Western Digital's website, green stands for Cool, Quiet Performance with Huge Capacity. I'm a little surprised they didn't come with red drives, as Western Digital describes red drives as "designed and tested for RAID environments". Hmm, most people who buy this product use RAID 1 or 0. Wait. AMAZED? Yes. The benefit of using this product is that you can use a feature called RAID. RAID 0 means the device treats 2 drives as 1 drive and pools the capacity of both drives so my iMac sees two 2TB drives as one. 4TB hard drive. Professional? Excellent performance. The Black Magic Disk Performance app reported that I got 267MB/s write speed and 274MB/s read speed. Botanist? If only 1 drive fails in RAID 0, you will lose all your data. So make sure you have a copy of your data elsewhere if you use RAID 0. RAID 1 means that the device handles 2 drives and separate drives and anything you write to on one drive is copied to the other drive. Professional? If a drive fails, all of your information is safely stored on another drive and all of that information is automatically copied to a new drive that replaces the failed drive. Botanist? Performance isn't as good as RAID 0 and you only get the capacity of one of the drives. In my example I would have 2TB instead of 4. Do I need to use the official Western Digital app to set up this device? no You can use Disk Utility that comes with OS X. What about encryption? When I tried to encrypt a drive using OS X Mavericks' built-in encryption utility, I received an error message. Users should be able to encrypt drives simply by right-clicking on the drive and selecting Encrypt. Apparently OS X cannot encrypt drives in a RAID configuration. I was able to encrypt the drive with True Crypt and encrypt the entire volume. However, I did notice that performance on RAID 0 dropped to around 60MB/s reading and writing after enabling encryption via True Crypt. I do not recommend using True Crypt as it greatly reduces performance and True Crypt is no longer updated or supported. overall impression? Excellent! It's totally different from USB 2 and Firewire 800. I'm so glad my iMac comes with Thunderbolt. I've read that it even outperforms USB 3 drives, but I don't know that firsthand. The assembly was easy and I am very satisfied with the work. However, this device is slightly more expensive. If you need that much capacity, want to spend a lot less money, and can compromise on speed, check out the USB 3 version. But first make sure your computer can use USB 3. USB 3 ports are blue for easy identification.