Western Digital Sentinel DX4000 16TB NAS Review

Having a drive vendor manufacture a NAS to work with their own line of drives is a welcomed approach to mass storage technologies. With this being Western Digital’s first revisions of their own NAS, a system that from the outside looks the part and on paper has a fair amount to offer shows that they have done some good research into what is needed and that they have what is needed to delve into this particular market.

With 16TB worth of drives already installed and the system ready to plug in and get set-up, which in its own part is a simple guided step by step process as Windows Storage Server is configured for the end users network environment. Using a Windows based interface is a little off piste to other NAS offerings and it does have it’s pros and cons. For Windows based environments, the Sentinel can be integrated to work seamlessly with a number of network clients, backing them up automatically in quiet periods (over night for example) and the simple desktop application and interface makes management relatively easy. Where it does fall down however is the number of options and the hassle that the end user has to go through when the eventuality arises that a full system reset is required. With Linux based systems, there is a one click factory reset option integrated in to the user interface, however with this unit, to cut a long story shots its basically a case of reinstalling Windows Storage Server on to the NAS which can take quite an amount of time – this is one of the major downsides to this system and I feel that a Linux based OS on the NAS would be a major benefit to both the systems performance but also towards the functionality that the could be to offer.

When it comes to upgrading the DX400 with more drives (for those that buy a lower capacity SKU in the first instance), there is a major point to note that there is a very limited compatibility set of hard drives and in most cases drives will wither not be detected or will not function properly. Using a 5400RPM drive also has an effect when it comes to rebuild times on the RAID5 array, if a 12TB system is bought for example and a compatible drive is added into the system, the slower drive results in a rebuild time that does take longer than usual – so this is something else to take note of.

I’m not saying this is a bad product in its entirety, certainly there are a number of great things to applaud Western Digital for with the redundant external power supplies and the very compact build as a result of some clever internal designs, but as I mentioned above, its the software side that loses some of the value that you get from the DX4000. Mentioning price, the top en configuration as I’ve tested here does come with a tall price tag of around £1400 (~US $2160 / €1640), but for that price you have to keep in mind that you will be getting four 4TB as well as the Windows licence on top of the system itself which bare is around £600 making it quite a competitively priced product. It would be nice to see Western Digital push forward their own Red drives in these units in the near future, granted their not going to be as power efficient as a 5400RPM drive, but they will offer better performance and seeing as their part of Western Digital’s front line in mass storage for the 1-5 bay NAS markets, it would only but make sense that they would use them in an updated revision of the Sentinel.

Bottom Line: Western Digital have got the right idea for making their own system with some hardware and design features that I would like to see used on other models and whilst the Windows Storage Server makes it easy to configure and up & running, its limited feature set and drive compatibility does let this system down in respect to what the competition has to offer.