As well a photos I shoot video and produce audio.
Prior to migrating to Mac as my platform I used to back up media on WD USB drives, copying video and audio files to be worked on to a much faster G-Tech e-SATA drive.
On Mac I use an Apple Time Capsule for back up and a Lacie Little Big Disk SSD Thunderbolt drive for AV files I'm working on.
However, now I've got a couple of documentaries that I've just started work on, so needed a larger drive that would be capable of editing HD video.
I looked at the Lacie d2, the add on SSD was a tempting idea, but it is expensive for what you get. Then a colleague mentioned that Western Digital have an educational webstore with huge discounts for those of us who work in education. I logged on to the site and found the recently released WD My Book Pro Thunderbolt/USB3 6TB RAID with £200 off!
A quick Google revealed this drive to be well reviewed so it was a bit of a no-brainer.
Install on Mac was a doddle, it comes ready formatted in HFS+ so its just a matter of plugging it in and powering it up.
I ran a Black Magic speed test and for a spinning drive its the fastest I've ever had. Easily fast enough for HD video editing. I believe the My Book Pro used two of the WD Black Enterprise quality hard drives.
The supplied WD utility software lets you set up the drive as either RAID 0 (for speed), RAID1 for a bit of data security and JBOD. RAID0 is the default and as this is to be an editing drive I have left it in that state.
Pleased my recommendation of WD was a success. I use the My Passport Pro 4TB Thunderbolt for location backups of photos and video. Although the Elgato Thunderbolt SSD is superfast and a convenient small size, the WD MP-Pro is very useful for large volume storage. I also back-up my desk-based Lightroom archive onto an identical drive. Great value if you have an academic email address.
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