WD My Passport Pro RAID offers portable Thunderbolt storage w/o power


Western Digital announced the Passport Pro, which is a Thunderbolt RAID drive. What's particularly interesting is this is a two-drive RAID that is powered entirely off of the Thunderbolt port. Similar to 2.5-inch USB drives, this drive doesn't require external power so it can be run entirely off of a laptop battery, for example. Added in RAID performance and Thunderbolt data bandwidth, it makes for an interesting solution.

The drives can be configured for either RAID 0 or RAID 1. This allows users to choose between higher performance or data safety with redundancy. RAID 0 stripes the drives together so they read/write simultaneously across both drives. RAID 1 is mirroring where the same data is written to both drives. In the event one drive fails, your data remains in tact and the RAID can be rebuilt by swapping the failed drive.

The drive comes in two flavors of 2 TB and 4 TB. MSRP is $299.99 and $429.99, respectively. Both products are available now.