It’s tempting that based purely on appearances, the 44TB Duo is identical to the old 12TB model, although other than the drives, we did notice one significant difference. If after those steps were unable to provide access to the Dashboard, there are a few things that can be attempted:

As I’ve already said, it also means I’ll have 6TB of capacity rather than the maximum of 12TB that I could have had if this drive had been configured as RAID 0. RAID 1 also offers slower transfer speed than when compared with RAID 0, so this test will show the results from a real-world test of the drive being used as storage solution for photographers and videographers. When the new My Book Duo arrived, I have to say I was impressed with the design. I use the small My Passport SSD as a working drive and the aesthetic design of the much larger Duo is much the same. Of these, the WD Drive utilities are the most vital, as they allow you to change the RAID configuration of the Duo. Are you looking for more storage for your 360 photos and videos? Here’s a hands-on review of WD My Book Duo, a fast, expandable external hard drive. However, it has a potential dealbreaker – hardware encryption (see below). I’ll also discuss the basics of RAID. Therefore, that plan that had you securing 22TB or 44TB of local data each night on this external drive is impractical from the outset unless the changes are minor or incremental.The USB 3.0/2.0 ports are designed for plugging in external devices and additional drives, which is handy. It also acts as a rather nifty doc for older devices that still utilise the USB 3.0/2.0 standard. If you look carefully, above the two USB 3.0/2.0 ports you’ll see a thin power button. This is used when you need to swap out drives. This is the default mode of My Book Duo. With RAID-0, each file is split between two drives. As with RAID-1, your drive can read from both drives at the same time, so the reading speed is theoretically almost double (for sequential reading). Meanwhile, the storage capacity is the same as normal. If you have two 8TB drives, then when using them in RAID-0, you will have a single 16TB drive with one drive letter. The disadvantage of RAID-0 is that if either or both of the drives fail, you will lose the data in both drives, therefore the chance of failure is almost double. Connection to your computer is via USB Type-C, and cables come for both this standard and to convert a conventional USB 3.0 port to the Type-C variety if you haven’t embraced that newish connector yet. Once the cable is connected and the drive is positioned, it can then be connected to your computer. It takes a few moments to mount, slightly longer than a single drive but still fast enough.

RAID 1 mirrors the content from each drive. This means that when you copy a file onto the drive, it will be duplicated across to the other drive. Although there are two 6TB drives giving a total capacity of 12TB, by using RAID 1 I’ll only have access to 6TB of total storage. In use, transfer speeds are pretty decent, by no means SSD speeds but perfectly suitable for the intended use and of course with the benefit of the huge capacity. Due to the vagaries of write speed on conventional hard drives as they fill and how smaller files slow down transfers, these timescales might be very optimistic in real-world exercises. With this configuration, the two disks inside the My Book Duo are treated as independent hard drives (each one has its own drive letter). With My Book Duo, you only need one USB cable to access both drives.Having this much capacity sounds like a dream, especially for those using a 4TB external drive or a smaller Duo model. But the dream of having this much space is also, oddly, something of a nightmare. The reality is that curating 22TB or 44TB of data on the Duo is a significant exercise. Transferring it on and off can’t be done at a whim, and the thought of losing that much data through hardware failure is terrifying.