A few years back, I took a look at one of the very first Thunderbolt solutions to hit the market, the My Book Thunderbolt Duo from Western Digital. At that point, I found that unit had a decent amount of features and respectable performance that hovered around 250 MB/s.

This review has shown that any jewel needs a proper setting. However fast a modern external hard disk drive may be, its speed is going to be limited by the widespread interfaces USB 2.0 and FireWire 400. Our tests of the Western Digital WDG1T5000N prove that point.

Western Digital has made a number of improvements on the original My Book with the Pro Edition. The capacity is a huge 500GB, and you get both FireWire 400 and 800 as well as the original USB 2 interface.

Looking for an external hard drive that combines plenty of storage space and good performance? Then Western Digital may have just the product for you with the My Book Pro Edition 500 GB. External hard drives are available in a wide selection of shapes and sizes.

I tested this device in RAID 0 using Crystal Disk Mark, AS SSD and AIDA 64 benchmarks. I benchmarked file sizes between 256KB to 25GB. I also monitored transfer speeds from this RAID enclosure to my RAID SSDs with file sizes up to 50 GB.

This Western Digital My Book Pro external RAID enclosure features two 5 TB WD Black series hard drives; Each drive is rated for 7200 RPM and has 128 MB of cache; In my experience there is no better hard drive than Western Digital Black series.

My system specs: Core i7 4790K 4.8 GHz Z97 OC Formula 16 GB DDR3 Trident X 2666 MHz SLI GTX 980 Classified RAID 0 SSDs; RAID 0 HDDs; BD-R 1000w PSU Dual Custom liquid Cooling Loops Win10 x64 I hooked up the My Book Pro to my PC via USB 3.0.

I like the speed of this unit, and the 2 USB 3 ports in the front are handy. The problem that I had is with the Thunderbolt daisy chaining feature. It is stated that you can run up to six devices, like 4K monitors or additional Thunderbolt devices.

Unlike many a full-sized external hard drive, My Book's cute, book-like design makes it look perfectly at home on your book shelf. The specifications, on the face of it, are quite impressive as well, with a mammoth 500GB capacity and fast 7200RPM rotational speed.

Looks great

Distinct vibration; Slow transfer speeds

The Western Digital My Book Pro has an unusual design, looking rather like a fat paperback book that you can sit neatly on your desk or on a shelf.

Well its got 12 TB of space, its Thunderbolt 2 and its got fancy top of the range Western Digital drives in it... Its fast and reliable, it sits under my desk and I can't hear it. I have it in Raid 0..... Yeah I know I am courting possible disaster and should go to RAID 1....