“WD MyBook Pro 8TB” via Thunderbolt 1 on Windows

Hello everyone.
I play with the idea to get a “WD My Book Pro 8TB”.
Now my question:
Is it possible to run the “WD My Book Pro 8TB” via Thunderbolt 1 on a pc to have a speed advantage against USB 3?

The WD device itself has Thunderbolt 2 but as far as I know is TB (Thunderbolt) also backward compatible. I guess that the TB port is intended primarily for Mac users, but there are also some Windows motherboards TB Support.
In my case, this is a board from Gigabyte from 2012 (GA-Z77X-UP5 TH) which, as I said, “only” TB 1 and has 2x TB 1 ports on board the board.
I have found some TB 2 Pci cards in the net, but it seems to be that those only run on Z89 & Z99 chipsets and not on my older Z77. So the option also falls away i think.
Now only my question whether I can connect the WD MyBookPro 8TB via TB 2 to TB 1 (backward compatible), and if this is runnign well, because when i buy such a high-end device, then I’d like to use the faster speed of TB 1 instead of USB 3.

Also worth mentioning is that I currently run Win7 ( 64bit ) but will do the upgrade to Win10 ( 64bit ) soon !

I am thankful for every tip and idea in this case!
Thanks in advance.
Flex

This question is actually more in tune with your Motherboard’s capabilities (And Gigagyte by extension) rather than the WD My Book Pro itself.

The WD My Book Pro is Windows-compatible even though it comes Mac-ready (Formatting required). However, Thunderbolt 2 support requires at least Windows 8.1 (Windows 7 is not supported).

As such, if Gigabyte is able to confirm whether or not your Motherboard can support Thunderbolt 2-compliant devices (Not brand-specific) in backwards compatibility mode once your system is updated to Windows 10 then I see no reason why the device would not work. This is a question for Gigabyte though.