Western Digital Sentinel DX4000 16TB NAS Review

In general a NAS box is just an external hard drive caddy that is attached to your network rather than by USB or even Firewire. Because of this we can find a whole host of other features and utilities bundled into them giving them the leading edge over the other options available on the market.

As opposed to the NAS solutions we typically look at, the DX4000 comes loaded with Windows Storage Server 2008 R2, a strain of Server 2008 that is cut down purely for this application. Its accessed and run entirely over remote desktop, although there is a web interface that can be configured for use later on instead. Another point we will highlight on before we go into the test results is the RAID levels. Unlike other systems that allow for different levels of RAID to be configured, the DX4000 is limited to just two levels and these are auto selected depending on the number of drives installed into the system. With two drives installed, Windows Storage Server sets the array to RAID 1 and with three or more drives, RAID 5 is the array of choice. This does somewhat sound a little strange given the fact that even though this is advertised as a 16TB NAS, you’ll only ever have no more than ~12TB to play with, but Western  Digital do advertise that data security is guaranteed out of the box.