Techwarelabs.com has a nice four page review of the Western Digital Sentinal DX 4000 NAS. This NAS is a four bay NAS, which befitting a hard drive maker, only comes pre-configured with Western Digital drives with several size options. There is no diskless version available.
The NAS comes configured with an Intel Atom D525 1.8 GHz Dual-Core and 2 Gigs of RAM. One of the most unusual aspects of the Western Digital Sentinal DX 4000 NAS server is that it comes with Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials installed as the operating system. Most NAS makers use a version of Linux for their operating system, so the Western Digital decision here makes this NAS different from the crowd.
Otherwise the NAS has the fairly common RAID 5 possibility and provides for automatic migration and capacity expansion.
This page of the review has a number of screen shots of the NAS as it is disassembled. One of the interesting hardware choices that Western Digital made is described:
One interesting feature is the redundant power supply of Sentinel. You don’t typically see that in consumer grade NAS’s. This just shows that Western Digital is packing some enterprise grade bells and whistles in their small office appliance. Purchasing an additional power brick to enable redundant power will set you back $60. Also included on the back of the NAS are 2 USB 3.0 ports and dual gigabit NIC’s to help in your high speed data transfers.
As to speed, the review clocked reads at 80.2 MB/s, which is quite speedy and in line with other four drive NAS servers.
This NAS is certainly one to look at, especially if you are interested in running a version of Windows server on the NAS. As a Windows server, it allows for use of the standard Windows remote desktop:
Because the Sentinel sports a full blown Windows Server OS, it is able to support the native Remote Desktop Protocol that is common in Microsoft’s operating systems. This is useful if the dashboard interface isn’t enough for you and you really want to get under the hood to either set some advanced permissions or install some additional applications on your NAS. The Remote Desktop feature will allow you to bring up a full desktop experience and manage the NAS the same way you would any other Windows Server.
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