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WD demos its first Thunderbolt drive at Macworld

Western Digital announced today its first Thunderbolt storage drive, the My Book Thunderbolt Duo, at MacWorld iWorld 2012.

Dong Ngo headshot
Dong Ngo
WD's demo of its first Thunderbolt-based external hard drive, the My Book Thunderbolt Duo.
WD's demo of its first Thunderbolt-based external hard drive, the My Book Thunderbolt Duo.
Dong Ngo/CNET

Having shown its first Thunderbolt drive at CES 2012 without providing much detail, Western Digital is now sharing more information the second time around.

The major storage vendor is showing off the same drive again, called the My Book Thunderbolt Duo, at Macworld iWord 2012, which is currently taking place in San Francisco.

The new My Book Thunderbolt Duo dual-drive storage system comes in the same shape and design as Western Digital's My Book Studio Edition II but it now has two Thunderbolt ports instead of any other connection options, such as USB or FireWire.

While Western Digital is still tight-lipped about the drive' details, it's my guess that with two internal hard drives on the inside, the new Thunderbolt drive can offer up to 6TB of storage in RAID 0 or 3TB in RAID 1. Like all Thunderbolt drives, it can be daisy-chained to offer more storage space. The drive can also be used together with other Thunderbolt devices, such as Apple's Thunderbolt Display.

From the demo I saw with four My Book Thunderbolt Duo units, the drive seems capable of offering sustained data speeds of around 520MBps for writing and 770MBps for reading. These are about as good as it can get for a storage device.

Currently, Western Digital still hasn't decided on the final release date of the My Book Thunderbolt Duo or its pricing. However, it's likely that the drive will be available in the first part of the year.