WD announces new My Passport for Mac and My Book VelociRaptor Duo drives

WD (part of Western Digital Corporation) today announced a pair of new storage products for Mac. The My Book VelociRaptor Duo (starting at USD$899.99) is billed as the fastest My Book external hard drive system ever released by WD, while the latest in the My Passport (starting at $99.99) portable line adds both capacity and a USB 3.0 interface to the venerable portable drives.

The My Book VelociRaptor Duo (above) is indeed a monster, matching two 1 TB 10,000 RPM WD VelociRaptor hard disk drives with twin Thunderbolt ports. As noted in a recent press event, the drive offers SSD-like data transfer speeds of up to 400 MB/s, and multiple My Book VelociRaptor Duo drives can be daisy-chained without impacting data transfer speeds.

The drive can be configured at RAID 0 to maximize speed and capacity, or as RAID 1 to provide instant mirroring of content. Some of the RAID 0 speeds one can expect include transferring a 22 GB full-length HD movie in less than 65 seconds or over 2000 5 MB photos in less than 33 seconds. The drive is user-serviceable, with a top door that reveals two easy-install trays.

The much more portable and affordable My Passport portable hard disk drives (below) have added USB 3.0 for use with MacBook Pro and MacBook Air devices that feature the interface. WD has also added a 2 TB version ($199.99) of the My Passport drive to the line, providing significant capacity and speed in a portable hard disk.