WD 16TB WD Sentinel DX4000 Small Business Network File Storage Server iSCSI NAS

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Product Feature

• Plug-and-play installation
• Complete Support for Mac OS
• Build-in secure remote access
• Equipped with a built-in DLNA media server
• Dual Gigabit Ethernet and dual USB 3.0 ports
• 25 client computer backup and restore licenses included
• Easily manage the setup, administration and deployment of iSCSI storage capabilities
• Secure remote access via a Web browser, plus a free Web sub-domain

Product Description

Whether you� �re an IT expert or not, WD Sentinel is easy to install and provides secure centralized storage, complete data protection, and remote file access for your employees and trusted vendors while in the office or from anywhere.

WD 16TB WD Sentinel DX4000 Small Business Network File Storage Server iSCSI NAS Review

My hobby is photography, and over the last 20 years I've accumulated a large (1.6Tb) catalog of family photos and videos (I've digitised all my slides, negatives and video tapes in order to preserve them). They are hence very precious to me and I am fairly paranoid about losing them to a hard disk failure, so have over the years invested in a series of ever-larger external hard drives to back my collection up to.

Recently I did have a multi-drive solution (Western Digital My Book Mirror Edition 2TB USB 2.0 (WDH2U20000N)) - and it worked great initially (for a year or so) but as time passed the interface (USB 2.) was a bottleneck, it's a point solution (not on the home network - I have to plug it in to any PC I want to back up), and it only holds two hard-drives (my data needs grew too fast for just two drives). I looked at upgrading that to the newest version as of this writing (Western Digital My Book World Edition II - 6 TB (2 x 3 TB) Network Attached Storage - which can be on the home network so I can back up my other family computers too, and is quite capacious at 6Tb - but it's only two drives so if one fails it's toast (unless I configure it to only have 3Tb of space, which is insufficient), and capacity is still limited as it's only two drives (the problem I gradually had with the previous one).

I also looked at plugging external drives like the ones mentioned above into my home router (NETGEAR RangeMax Wireless-N300 Gigabit Router with USB WNR3500L) but again capacity was limited, USB 2.0 is slow, it's still vulnerable to hard disk failure, so didn't work very well.

What I really needed was a more-than-two-hard-drive solution that plugs into the network that is fast, as reliable as possible, expandable and brain-dead easy to use. I seriously considered the Drobo FS (Drobo FS 5-bay Gbe Storage Array) for this purpose, along with maybe a pile of extra-reliable hard drives (e.g. Western Digital 2 TB RE4-GP SATA 3 Gb/s Intellipower 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Enterprise Hard Drive - WD2002FYPS). It looks easy enough to screw together and easy to use. Also, another alternative I considerd was this: Buffalo Technology TeraStation Pro Quad 8 TB (4 x 2 TB) RAID Windows Storage Server WS-QV8.0TL/R5 (black). However instead, I went for the item being reviewed, for the following reasons:

- Unlike the Drobo, the DX4000 comes with four extra-reliable hard drives (Western Digital 2 TB RE4-GP SATA 3 Gb/s Intellipower 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Enterprise Hard Drive - WD2002FYPS) built-in, which at the time of writing is cheaper to buy than individually with the Robo Case, and also means I don't have to plug them in myself.
- Unlike the Drobo solution and Buffalo, the hard drives and the case they are in are all from the same manufacturer (Western Digital), so will have been extensively tested together etc. and so I feel better about how well they will all work together from a reliability and performance perspective, which is of paramount importance to me. They are all also covered under the same warranty in the DX4000, of course (which can be extended if I need it to be).
- The DX4000 has, in my opinion, better Enterprise-grade software running upon it than the Drobo - specifically, Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials. The Drobo runs on a version of Linux customised by Drobo, which I personally do not trust to work as well. The Buffalo solution runs Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Workgroup Edition, also a very good choice in my opinion. Both of these solutions are based upon the latest version of Microsofts' Server Enterprise-grade Operating System (Windows Server Standard 2008 R2 with SP1 x64 1pack DSP OEI 1-4CPU 5 Client), a key feature for me as I think Microsoft knows more about Enterprise Software than the manufacturers of Drobo.
- The DX4000 supports two power supplies for increased redundancy, a feature I made use of by simply buying a second one direct from Western Digital's web site.
- The DX4000 supports two network cables, again for reliability but also for performance. I made use of this feature too by buying a second cable, also from Western Digital's web site (even though it's cheaper elsewhere but for the price heck just give me a cable I know will work and I will pay a bit more for it for this purpose).
- Solutions such as this one from any manufacturer are vulnerable to power failure - they must be shut down cleanly; yanking the plug, power cuts or brown-outs are likely to cause Bad Things To Happen (like data corruption). I once lost some of my data when this happened to me (some data got partially corrupted upon RAID rebuild, for you techies out there). So a dedicated Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) is a requirement in my opinion; I exhort anyone to not buy this unit (or another like it) UNLESS you have a UPS for it, too. I got this one: CyberPower CP1000PFCLCD UPS 1000VA 600W PFC Compatible Pure Sine Wave- which has a USB cable which plugs into one of the ports on the back of the DX4000 and tells it when power is about to go out so it can shut down (by default it will hibernate when there is only 7% of the battery left). The DX4000 seems to use about 41 watts when it is running, and this UPS says on it's little display that it can run for about an hour without power on that load plus my router (NETGEAR RangeMax Wireless-N300 Gigabit Router with USB WNR3500L) and my cable-modem before automatically, and safely shutting down.
- This unit has the new USB 3.0 ports on the back so permitting me to expand it's capacity by plugging in external drives, which is easy and very fast thanks to it being version 3.0 rather than the more common 2.0. One is used by the UPS now so I only have one other to use but I could use a powered hub if I needed it.

In use, this unit was extremely easy to set up and configure- I just plugged it in, waited for it to display it was ready on it's little external display (took about 10 minutes), and on each PC on my home network opened a browser to the address given in the instructions and followed the prompts. Backup software was installed, and so was some software to manage it. (I have only PC's at home - laptops mostly- so did not try the Mac functionality although that is supported according to the documentation.) All very easy to use; could not really have been simpler. Zero tech skills required. It's very quiet too so I am able to sit it on a shelf where I have my cable modem and you would not know it is there. It is nice and small, as well so was easy to hide away.

It has 5.39Tb of free capacity once all is said and done for actually storing files and backups. Upgrading the internal disks looks to be very easy - no tools required and you don't even have to power the unit off - just pull out and replace one disk at a time, let the unit rebuild the data onto the new disk - then replace the next disk until you've changed all four disks (if you want). So with 3Tb disks instead of the 2Tb disks this one comes with that would give you 4Tb more capacity (of which about only 3Tb would be usable by the time it's been formatted etc.) Note that only specific disks from Western Digital are supported internally by this unit so you will not be able to throw in any old hard drives you have lying around, as you can with the Drobo, for example. You could use them for external expansion though via the USB 3.0 port in this unit.

It can be configured to email you when there are issues, for example when a PC on the network has not been backed up for a few days. PC's in the house do not need to be left on to be backed up, either - the unit will (optionally) wake them from sleep mode in the middle of the night (or whenever you choose) to back them up. However if powered off then this will not work of course, hence the alerts letting you know this. Backups can be manually kick-started of course and you can include external disks on your PC's for backup as well if you want.

You can browse and store/retrieve any data stored on the unit over a secured Internet connection if you want e.g. if you are in the Office and want some file or other from your unit at home. I don't need this feature so did not enable it but some will no doubt find this useful.

Performance is very good - I get around 80Mb/s to it over my wired LAN using the router mentioned above. The drives are only 5200 RPM efforts though - would have been nice if Western Digital had used the faster 7200 RPM versions but I presume this is for lower power consumption and better reliability though so I am not complaining - it's fast enough to max out my LAN as it is and hopefully faster drives will be supported in the future.

Negative features: I really haven't come across anything I don't like about this unit at all, yet - it's absolutely awesome and exactly what I have been looking for for a loooong time. If I HAD to moan about one thing it would be the brightness of the blue lights on the display and for each of the drives - as my unit lives where I can see it out of the corner of my eye when watching TV then it was a bit distracting sometimes. I could not find a way to darken the display - so I just turned the unit to face sideways rather than at the room, and now I can't see it's flickering lights so not much of an issue, really. Other than that minor niggle I love this unit and feel much better about my valuable data and love how easy it is to keep my entire household's computer collection easily backed up and with pretty minimal power consumption too. Very highly recommended.

**Power Users**: If you are technically inclined, then you might like to know you can Remote Desktop to this device from a PC on your network, and it looks like any other Windows Server at which you log on; allowing you to install your choice of software on it and configure it how you would like. You can enable compression on the data drive, for example. I installed the CrashPlan client on my DX4000, which is spending a few months backing my unit's entire data drive up to the Internet for additional safety. I also hooked up an external hard drive to my unit and used SyncToy to copy data off of it to the internal drive array, which was much quicker via USB 3.0 than doing it over the LAN (even though the same objective could be and was achieved of course). This unit is also running Windows Internet Information Server 7.5 so you can host a web site or FTP site if you want from this device or do anything you can on IIS 7.5, pretty much. You can also join it to your Domain, if you have one (it cannot BE a Domain Controller, though). Also join it to your HomeGroup if you have one. You could probably install SQL Server too if you wanted but installed memory is only 2Gb so that might not work very well (I didn't try). Lighter-memory-footprint databases might, though. It runs version 4.0 of the .Net framework so put any Windows software you want on it, in theory. Interestingly, Task Manager displays 4 CPU's - I think the dual-core CPU (an Intel Atom D525 1.8 GHz) must be hyper-threaded too, making it a little more capable (yet still power-efficient). Basically the OS is a feature-reduced version of the full Windows Server 2008 R2 Product so there is a great deal of scope for messing about with it, if you are so inclined. Please feel free to ask me questions about this if you are interested via comments on this review; I will try my best to answer them.

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