Yes, you can buy more 1TB external drives if you need additional storage for your computing setup. Problem is, hooking up five separate drives to your laptop just isn’t an efficient way of working. If you want to access a large amount of storage while using up just a single data port, you might want to check out Western Digital’s 20TB My Book Duo.
That’s right, this box houses a full 20TB of storage in a single enclosure, so you can edit all the 4K videos you want without having to hook up multiple hard drives to your laptop. Whether you work with large files or just need a hub for all the content you’re downloading on torrent (let’s not pretend you don’t), this thing’s generous capacity allows you to consolidate all your media in a single place.
The Western Digital My Book Duo 20TB uses the outfit’s Red hard disks as opposed to faster (and more expensive) SSDs, although the 360 MB/s sequential read speeds over USB Type-C will definitely be fast enough to make it viable for disk-intensive chores. It posts that speed, by the way, at the default RAID-0 configuration, so if you want automatic data mirroring (which is available), you’re going to have to put up with slightly slower performance. The rig can also be used in JBOD configuration, where it’s treated as nothing more than a bunch of hard drives.
Unless you’re dealing with sensitive data, chances are, you won’t need much in the way of security to protect all the drone footage, GoPro action clips, and movie downloads you’re storing in the drive. If you do, however, you can activate the integrated 256-bit AES hardware encryption, which can be easily set up via the preloaded WD Security software.
No word on how many hard drives are actually inside each Western Digital My Book Duo 20TB. Given the amount of storage, though, we imagine they’ve got a few in there. The entire enclosure, by the way, measures 3.9 x 7.1 x 6.3 inches (width x height x depth), so it will likely live out its life on your desk as its permanent home, unless you’re willing to lug around a big box in your backpack.
Aside from putting a massive amount of storage on your hands, the device can also serve as a mini-USB hub as it comes with a pair of USB 3 ports for plugging in your DSLR to transfer photos, charging your phone, or adding an optical mouse to your laptop. It comes with two cables, one for USB-C to USB-C and another for USB-C to USB-A. Do note, the read speed will get slower with a USB-A connection, so make sure to consider that when planning out your setup. And, yes, it comes with a disk replacement tool, so you can easily swap in new disks in case you encounter problems with the ones inside the enclosure.
The Western Digital My Book Duo 20TB is priced at $849.99. If 20TB is too much, they also sell the rig in smaller capacities, ranging from 6TB to 16TB.