Supercharge your creative workflow

When juggling multiple client projects, an in-demand design studio needs to manage and store a huge array of creative assets at any one time – reference materials, work-in-progress and high-res images and video, not to mention the final signed-off design work itself.

And there are few worse experiences as a pro designer than the devastating realisation that you’ve lost all those project files as deadline fast approaches. Everyone has heard a cringeworthy horror story of a backup drive that’s bitten the dust, and it’s an unenviable task to have to explain it to the client.

With this in mind, both reliability and speed are absolutely of the essence when choosing a pro-quality storage solution for your studio. A hefty capacity can’t hurt either; especially as modern design projects are demanding an ever-increasing range of assets to run across multiple formats and platforms.

In short, it’s about finding a device that’s highly efficient, saves you time and ultimately puts your mind at rest. As a world-leading manufacturer of external storage systems, Western Digital knows this only too well and its top-of-the-range offering of sophisticated, high-performance secure systems are perfectly tailored to the needs of busy creative professionals.

The My Book VelociRaptor Duo is ideal both for storing creative assets, and for using as a super-fast scratch drive for rendering out processor-heavy artwork.

Inside the compact, stylish cage you’ll find a pair of 1TB WD VelociRaptor drives, each spinning at an eye-watering 10,000 rpm – almost 40 per cent faster than most of the competition with their combined power, putting even solid-state drives firmly in the shade.

The My Book Velociraptor Duo drive also takes full advantage of the blisteringly fast Thunderbolt interface, which can theoretically handle data transfer of up to 10GB/s although Western Digital’s official performance figures for the drive are 380-400MB/s for writing/reading respectively.

To put that into context, it equates to 500x 5MB images in just over 30 seconds, or a 20GB HD movie in around one minute. It’s the kind of high-end performance that can literally shave hours off your workflow in the long run, freeing up more time to focus on the most important task: designing.

Best of all, if your storage needs escalate then using the dual Thunderbolt ports to daisy-chain several drives together will actually enhance their performance even further.

You get what you pay for when it comes to high-end storage solutions, and the My Book Velociraptor Duo certainly delivers plenty of power and performance. But despite all this, it’s still whisper-quiet even while data is being transferred.

A simple touch-click mechanism pops the top panel open to expose the cage within, ideal for servicing or to replace one of the WD VelociRaptor drives when it’s full to the brim with all your project assets and work-in-progress files, ready for archiving.

Of course, different studios will have different primary purposes for a high-end storage device. If secure backup isn’t top of the agenda, your studio can instead prioritise using the drive for additional temporary storage to speed up processor-intensive design tasks.

My Book Velociraptor Duo can be configured for maximum speed, or maximum data protection. Using a RAID 0 (striping) configuration, the entire 2TB capacity of the two drives combined is made available for storage, for times when both speed and capacity are of the essence.

If you’re rendering out a complex piece of artwork, or editing a large-format layout with multiple hi-res images, using this setup will enable you to allocate a super-fast scratch space on the drive – cutting out the pain of progress bar delays and banishing that dreaded whirling rainbow wheel to the Trash, so your creative juices can keep flowing.

Alternatively, for more conventional file-storage purposes RAID 1 (mirroring) will provide a double-safe backup for up to 1TB of data, providing that extra peace of mind for storing those crucial project files, so you never let a client down on a deadline again.

There’s also a third option, using the JBOD system this provides you with two separate 1TB drives, which is ideal if you want to boot up your system from one of them at lightning speed, wasting no time when you arrive at the studio in the morning before getting stuck into the next creative project.

All of these options can be configured through the WD Drive Utilities installer, where you can also set the security level, format the drive and set up a sleep timer useful to avoid unnecessary burnout if the network is up and running constantly.

The My Book Velociraptor Duo also works with Time Machine out of the box great news for design studios that swear by their suite of Thunderbolt-equipped, top-of-the-range iMacs, and will accept only the very best storage solution to match.