WD equips portable storage system with raid drives with thunderbolt

Western Digital has announced the My Passport Pro, a portable external storage system with two hard drives. The hard disks are configurable in raid 0 or raid 1. The My Passport Pro offers up to 4TB of storage and only has a thunderbolt connection.

The Western Digital My Passport Pro features 2.5″ drives stacked in a compact aluminum housing. WD supplies the external storage system with a storage capacity of 2TB or 4TB. The drives can be configured in raid 0, where a speed of up to 233MB/s could be achieved.In raid 1 mode, the contents of the drives are mirrored.

WD claims that the Thunderbolt interface, which was mainly picked up by Apple, performs significantly better than USB 3.0. For example, copying large video files would be twice as fast on average via a thunderbolt interface. In addition, the Western Digital My Passport Pro does not require a separate power supply: the required voltage is supplied via the thunderbolt cable.

The two versions of the WD My Passport Pro are available immediately. By default, the drives are formatted in hfs+j, the file system for OS X. The 2TB version costs 369 euros, while the 4TB edition should fetch 499 euros.