Well the case new and I'm not sure there was a 20TB option before this one.



I recently bought a 16TB My Book Duo for something like ~$460 USD which I thought was a decent price at the time. Inside were two WD Red 8TB drives which I moved to a Mediasonic 8 bay Probox RAID enclosure.



I also recently bought two WD Easystore 8TB USB drives for ~$159 and they each had a WD Red 8TB drive in them. Those two were removed and installed in the Mediasonic 8 bay Probox RAID enclosure for backup purposes on an 8 bay Synology DS1815+ NAS loaded with 8x 8TB WD Red drives.



The thing about the old style WD My Book Duo was that the drives came with a warranty and they were easy to remove from the factory enclosure due to being designed to be user replaceable. This new WD My Book Due doesn't look like it has the same design goals in mind but its hard to tell.



Also note that with the previous version hardware encryption was compulsory and as such should anything go wrong with the enclosure you would be left with encrypted data and no way to access it. Installing the HDD's in an identical WD MyBook Duo enclosure wouldn't help because the encryption was tied to the specific enclosure (enclosures logic board).



So while it may be cheaper to buy the MyBook Duo rather then stand alone WD Red drives it could cause problems for you if you use the factory enclosure.

Posted on Aug 23rd 2017, 8:59 Reply