Western Digital Sentinel DX4000: An Easy-to-Configure NAS Box - watersthermse

At a Glance

Skilled's Rating

Pros

Four drive bays
USB 3.0 port2

Our Verdict

A buirdly and well-studied piece of hardware, the Sentinel DX4000 represents a good effort, simply information technology doesn't deliver enough on performance or features.

The four-bay, $900 (as of March 23, 2012) Western Whole number Sentry DX4000 4TB is the only NAS box we've time-tested newly that uses Microsoft's Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials for its operating system. All other comers are Linux-supported, which turns bent be a sizeable vantage. Contempt being a well-planned piece of hardware, the Spotter DX4000 doesn't birth enough performance operating theater features to compete head-to-head with the accelerate demons we've seen from QNAP and Synology.

Not a accompany that's content to footstep back in time, Western Member has weaponed the DX4000 with progressive, trayless, quick-change bays (only slide in the drives), dual gigabit ethernet ports, and deuce USB 3.0 ports. Pairing ethernet ports provides failover security just in case one connection goes behind, simply the NAS box doesn't keep going assembling for increased functioning. USB 3.0 means faster local backup of the box, but the absence of eSATA might defeat the treat for future buyers who require to use existing eSATA drives to back heavenward the DX4000. The WD's NAS box even has dual AC jacks, though information technology ships with just united exponent brick.

Microsoft's Storage Waiter 2008 R2 Essentials is much easier to install connected the DX4000 than Windows Home Server was on some cheaper NAS boxes that employed it in Recent epoch years. Whereas those boxes needful an installation disc, the DX4000 has every of its software system loaded on board the box. Surf to the Sentinel DX4000's IP address, follow the prompts, and you'rhenium golden. Once through initiation process, you use the supplied Connector software to access and configure the box. Advanced computer software features include DLNA-documented and iTunes media streaming, but non much else, though Western Integer does expect to add online fill-in before long.

The Sentinel DX4000 automatically configures drives to an appropriate RAID level, and reconfigures them as you add drives. With 2 drives on add-in, as on our trial run unit, the default mode is RAID 1 mirroring; add a third motor and the unit will switch to Foray 5.

With the same dual-core Intel Atom D525 CPU that the selfsame warm QNAP TS-459 Favoring Deuce uses, but double the memory (2GB), the Sentinel DX4000 ought to experience delivered better performance numbers pool than we proverb. In our tests, the box wrote our 10GB mix of files and folders at 36 megabytes per second, wrote our 10GB single file at 58 MBps, and read the large file at 83 MBps–all middle-of-the battalion numbers. Connected the other pass on, it was the fastest of the multibay NAS boxes we tried and true at reading the mingle of folders and files, playing the task at 57 MBps.

Though not the most feature-rich of NAS boxes, the Sentry DX4000 provides all of the basics and is certainly the easiest model for non-Information technology types to install and configure. It's not crummy, merely it is a worthy, good-financed product that is generally worthy of inclusion in any small business's NAS purchasing conversation.