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WD teases with Thunderbolt drive demo

Western Digital shows off its new, unannounced Thunderbolt storage devices at CES 2012.

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Dong Ngo
Dong_Ngo.jpg
Dong Ngo SF Labs Manager, Editor / Reviews
CNET editor Dong Ngo has been involved with technology since 2000, starting with testing gadgets and writing code for CNET Labs' benchmarks. He now manages CNET San Francisco Labs, reviews 3D printers, networking/storage devices, and also writes about other topics from online security to new gadgets and how technology impacts the life of people around the world.
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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

LAS VEGAS--It's a teaser to say the least.

Without any ado or even a hint, Western Digital showcased at CES 2012 its first Thunderbolt-based external hard drive, called the My Book Thunderbolt Duo. This is a drive that looks exactly like the My Book Studio II with one main difference: on the back it comes with two Thunderbolt ports and no other connection types.

The four demo drives are daisy-chained together to offer very fast performance.
The four demo drives are daisy-chained together to offer very fast performance. Dong Ngo/CNET

There's not much information about the drive, but one thing is clear: this is a dual-bay drive, meaning that it hosts two internal hard drives. These hard drives are more than likely set up in a RAID configuration.

In the sneak peek, there were four drives daisy-chained together and the demo machine showed a top performance of around 515MBps for writing and 770MBps for reading, which is as good as it gets when it comes to storage performance.

WD says that it will formally announce the My Book Thunderbolt duo at the next MacWorld Expo, which is slated to take place later this month. I guess we'll have to wait till then to learn more about the new drive and its pricing.