Having upgraded our office iMacs with something new after each refresh, the new 2012 iMac has a release date in Nov, you might now realize a new Thunderbolt hard drive is well deserved after more options are starting to appear. When it comes to Western Digital they have some nice 2TB to 6TB Thunderbolt hard drive, which include the impressive My Book VelociRaptor Duo external drive that features an impressive twin configuration of 10,000RPM hard drives.

If you follow the new releases from Western Digital then you might remember the My Book Thunderbolt Duo external hard drives from Spring, which were impressive but nothing like the current offering in the form of VelociRaptor’s 10,000RPM drives. The product that launched this past spring only included 7,200RPM drives, and the new faster option is said to compete with the speed of SSDs.

On paper you’ll notice WD’s My Book VelociRaptor Duo has a 380MB/S write speed and 400MB/S read speed, although when you take into account the Thunderbolt ports and daisy-chain possibilities you can achieve much faster performance.

SSD vs. WD My Book VelociRaptor Duo on price – it is worth noting that Western Digital’s external drives are supported by Mac OS X as a bootable device, and on larger storage options it is fair to say that WD drives are currently cheaper per GB when compared to large SSDs. If you can gain the same performance with the correct configuration, or at least similar, then this is something well worth considering.

The My Book VelociRaptor Duo will be around double the price (over $800) of My Book Thunderbolt Duo drives, although this is certainly made up in performance but this is a choice you’d need to make that depends on what you need to achieve. You can see an official product demo in the first video below, and also an unboxing of the My Book VelociRaptor Duo in the second video, and a quick look at the speed in the third video. The official product page can be seen here, which includes full specs and features.

Bottom-line: Western Digital still claims there’s a market for hybrid drives even with the SSD cost lowering month-on-month, but we can’t help but expect a time to come very soon that SSD will be a cheaper option with at least equal performance. At this time Western Digital are doing pretty good and recently announced double the profits to $519m, so it will be interesting to see what WD’s strategy will be as SSDs drop even further in price.

The two companies have been competing for years, however the market is changing due to different types of storage now available, it is thought that hard-disk drive shipments will drop by about 4 percent this quarter, which many believe is mainly due to the influx of tablets which use solid-state disk and flash storage instead.

Last year Western Digital attempted to buy Seagate, however there were concerns surrounding antitrust issues therefore no deal ever materialized, it is thought that Western Digital will now target Seagate’s enterprise customers.

Before any talk of acquisitions arose Western Digital was the largest hard-drive manufacturer, Seagate was the second largest and Hitachi third, this deal surely means that Western Digital will undoubtedly be the largest manufacturer of had drives for years to come.

According to Bloomberg WD shipped 52.2 million drives in Q4 2010, Seagate came close with 48.9 million shipped units and Hitachi came in third place with 30.3 million units shipped, it is hard to see how Seagate will battle a company who will have such a large part of the HDD market, but Seagate has been around for 31 years and will undoubtedly plan to keep pushing forward with larger, faster and quieter drives.

If you would like to read more about this deal check out Bloomberg for full details.

Western Digital are one of the leading brands of external hard drives, and we have some information on the 500GB WD My Passport Hard Drive, which can be identified by it’s model number – WDBAAA5000ABKWM.

This hard drive can be bought for around $70-$120 at the moment, but it is very likely that you’ll find this particular model discounted during the busy shopping period which kicks off next week. It is plug and play compatible, and also comes with a visual backup control center and hardware encryption and password encryption facilities.

If you are interested in picking up this particular model, you are advised to read some reviews for it first. You’ll be pleased to know that there are almost 300 user reviews over at Amazon, with consumers giving their honest thoughts on the device, and whether it is a definite purchase, or an item to avoid.

Take a look at the reviews over at Amazon here, you’ll find them towards the bottom of the page.

If any of you already own one of these hard drives, let us know your thoughts on it. Would you recommend it for others to buy, or do you regret your purchase?