Western Digital Corporation (WD) is well known in the industry for their superior quality ECO friendly Hard Disk drives and also other home media entertainment devices in their WD TV Streaming Media Player line of products. WD has been making Network attached Storage (NAS) devices for quite some time now & generally has been well received by consumers especially in their WD My Book Live Duo series.
Review of Sentinel RX4100:
WD had released "Tower Model" closely similar specs of this Network File Storage server in 2011. They called it WD Sentinel DX4000 & were generally received well in the industry, when most small & medium sized business owners of this tower model felt the need for space consolidation WD anticipated this need and fabricated this RACK version of Sentinel series calling it RX4100.
Specification wise WD Sentinel DX4000 & Rack mountable WD Sentinel RX4100 is pretty much similar and so are the performance characteristics. Sentinel RX4100 has an edge in performance as it gets a RAM upgrade from 2GB to 4GB and also gets iSCSI right out of the box (the old Sentinel DX4000 got it by software upgrade using Starwind iSCSI)
Hardware: - 4 ½ stars
WD's products are generally very well made & quality is very good. Sentinel RX4100 is no exception. The Main logic boards, Electronics have distinctive WD's excellent quality. WD's first RX4100's RACK server is seen to be built with solid metal frame and HDD cages are also solid metal enclosed with great care, very well protected physically by locks from theft & abuse. You can also lock the drives by software password for double protection.
I know I am nitpicking here but the First place I found slight issue was the hardware inside the internal Power Supply. It seemed out of place in quality when compared with rest of the hardware. The design seems a `deadly' single point of failure unless you buy an additional (Optional) second external Power supply to safeguard yourself from total system failure.
The Internal FAN inside the enclosed power supply was slightly nosier compared to other system FANs. In most cases noise in server room is just `white noise' and no one really cares. BTW, Please be forewarned that the system will force a server shutdown in mere 2 mins if this Power Supply fan were to fail to protect the electronics and your data.
This is a "RACK" Mount server, but the mounting hardware DO NOT includes Rails or tray mount to house this storage server in a 19" rack, only couple was screws were included no other mounting instructions. At the time of writing this review there were no RACK mounting hardware order-able in the accessories section of WD's website.
Noting the above two concerns, collectively losing ½ stars in the `hardware' section.
OS & Software Performance: - 3 stars
I am not a big fan of anything Micro$oft for that matter, Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials is no exception. I must confess; this personal experience with most Microsoft bloated OS software products might have played a role in biasing OS & Software with 3 stars.
In my opinion, No matter how pretty & user friendly it might look for a business owner in terms of Windows GUI familiarity , the painfully long setup time due to the operating system overhead, patch updates on a severely underpowered CPU & RAM negates the use of this OS. Truthfully, the core hardware is adequate enough for running what this Server is designed for but IMHO, not with Microsoft Storage server 2008 R2 64-bit OS.
WD puts a big warning on console desktop not to use this server as a WORKSTATION because it can severely impact Server performance & File share NAS performance. A Linux flavor OS with less overhead would have made this a killer performing box with minimal web based GUI to create NAS, iSCSI shares (A wishful thinking)
Setting up this Server (Software wise) takes somewhere between 2-6 hrs depending on your network bandwidth as Microsoft somehow never gets the software updates in one shot. It keeps coming & coming, cumulatively one bunch or the other and installing patches & updates while the hardware RAID 5 is verifying for the initial install just takes too much time & adds to frustration during bring up of this storage server.
This is the `initial' release of the OS & software which is painfully slow to setup & update Microsoft mandated patches. May be in the future if WD tweaks & optimizes the initial OS build from factory the bring-up experience frustration can be eliminated.
Bottom-line: - 3 ½ stars
Previous users of WD's Sentinel series will find this Rack model very useful for space consolidation if you already have 19 inch Rack & mounting Rails or tray in your business sever room. Performance wise has slight improvement due to upgraded 4GB RAM.
New users of this Rack model Storage server who are unfamiliar with NAS and has no IT experience but basic windows GUI knowledge might find the Windows Storage Server essentials from Microsoft useful but needs to understand it will be time consuming during the initial setup. Thankfully you do that only once & WD also provides 3 years standard warranty included in the price.
In the end - Does it work? - Adequately Yes, Amazon does not allow me to give 3 ½ stars for being fair I am rating this with 4 stars!
You can buy this from Amazon by using the link below:
Review of Sentinel RX4100:
WD had released "Tower Model" closely similar specs of this Network File Storage server in 2011. They called it WD Sentinel DX4000 & were generally received well in the industry, when most small & medium sized business owners of this tower model felt the need for space consolidation WD anticipated this need and fabricated this RACK version of Sentinel series calling it RX4100.
Specification wise WD Sentinel DX4000 & Rack mountable WD Sentinel RX4100 is pretty much similar and so are the performance characteristics. Sentinel RX4100 has an edge in performance as it gets a RAM upgrade from 2GB to 4GB and also gets iSCSI right out of the box (the old Sentinel DX4000 got it by software upgrade using Starwind iSCSI)
Hardware: - 4 ½ stars
WD's products are generally very well made & quality is very good. Sentinel RX4100 is no exception. The Main logic boards, Electronics have distinctive WD's excellent quality. WD's first RX4100's RACK server is seen to be built with solid metal frame and HDD cages are also solid metal enclosed with great care, very well protected physically by locks from theft & abuse. You can also lock the drives by software password for double protection.
I know I am nitpicking here but the First place I found slight issue was the hardware inside the internal Power Supply. It seemed out of place in quality when compared with rest of the hardware. The design seems a `deadly' single point of failure unless you buy an additional (Optional) second external Power supply to safeguard yourself from total system failure.
The Internal FAN inside the enclosed power supply was slightly nosier compared to other system FANs. In most cases noise in server room is just `white noise' and no one really cares. BTW, Please be forewarned that the system will force a server shutdown in mere 2 mins if this Power Supply fan were to fail to protect the electronics and your data.
This is a "RACK" Mount server, but the mounting hardware DO NOT includes Rails or tray mount to house this storage server in a 19" rack, only couple was screws were included no other mounting instructions. At the time of writing this review there were no RACK mounting hardware order-able in the accessories section of WD's website.
Noting the above two concerns, collectively losing ½ stars in the `hardware' section.
OS & Software Performance: - 3 stars
I am not a big fan of anything Micro$oft for that matter, Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials is no exception. I must confess; this personal experience with most Microsoft bloated OS software products might have played a role in biasing OS & Software with 3 stars.
In my opinion, No matter how pretty & user friendly it might look for a business owner in terms of Windows GUI familiarity , the painfully long setup time due to the operating system overhead, patch updates on a severely underpowered CPU & RAM negates the use of this OS. Truthfully, the core hardware is adequate enough for running what this Server is designed for but IMHO, not with Microsoft Storage server 2008 R2 64-bit OS.
WD puts a big warning on console desktop not to use this server as a WORKSTATION because it can severely impact Server performance & File share NAS performance. A Linux flavor OS with less overhead would have made this a killer performing box with minimal web based GUI to create NAS, iSCSI shares (A wishful thinking)
Setting up this Server (Software wise) takes somewhere between 2-6 hrs depending on your network bandwidth as Microsoft somehow never gets the software updates in one shot. It keeps coming & coming, cumulatively one bunch or the other and installing patches & updates while the hardware RAID 5 is verifying for the initial install just takes too much time & adds to frustration during bring up of this storage server.
This is the `initial' release of the OS & software which is painfully slow to setup & update Microsoft mandated patches. May be in the future if WD tweaks & optimizes the initial OS build from factory the bring-up experience frustration can be eliminated.
Bottom-line: - 3 ½ stars
Previous users of WD's Sentinel series will find this Rack model very useful for space consolidation if you already have 19 inch Rack & mounting Rails or tray in your business sever room. Performance wise has slight improvement due to upgraded 4GB RAM.
New users of this Rack model Storage server who are unfamiliar with NAS and has no IT experience but basic windows GUI knowledge might find the Windows Storage Server essentials from Microsoft useful but needs to understand it will be time consuming during the initial setup. Thankfully you do that only once & WD also provides 3 years standard warranty included in the price.
In the end - Does it work? - Adequately Yes, Amazon does not allow me to give 3 ½ stars for being fair I am rating this with 4 stars!
You can buy this from Amazon by using the link below:
Thanks for reading my review, for miscellaneous thoughts please see my comments below:
Miscellaneous thoughts:
ReplyDeleteThe Sentinel RX4100 uses an Intel Atom D525 1.8 GHz Dual-Core processor (Hyper threading enabled) paired up with 4GB of DDR3 memory plus RX4100 also uses Intel® RST RAID 5 (Strip with parity) controller which is capable of RAID 1 & 5 but since this model has 4 drives RAID 1 mirror makes no sense.
RAID 0 Spanning or RAID 10 spanning & striping is not possible in this RAID BIOS as it is seen disabled. I know RAID 0 and 10 provides excellent I/O performance but cannot be implemented in this model of Sentinel. In RAID 5 implementation the total useable capacity in this 8TB model flavor is about 5.39TB (Losing one full disk) plus 60GB chunk for Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 OS.
Sentinel RX4100 does not come with recovery media for bare metal restore if all the system HDDs were to fail but you need to manually download a huge 8GB ISO file from WD see here:
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=1603&sid=204&lang=en
Use the link above to perform recovery to factory defaults or repair corrupted OS due to Virus or other configuration corruption reasons.
The amount of time it takes to finalize Microsoft OS updates & user configuration It would make sense if You could `disk image' the bare OS & configuration partitions on this storage server before you start populating the shares with user data but the recovery medium & software needs to be UEFI compatible 64bit WinPE due to UEFI based BIOS used on this server.
WD forces you to buy expensive replacement upgrade drives by WD's Enterprise class disk drives for this product and using any third party cheap drives in the system will not work as the OS & WD software code will reject it calling it "incompatible drive" and force a shutdown of the third party drive.
I could achieve this feat to some extent when I desperately wanted to image the current System disks for changing RAID types & try third party disks for academic & review reasons but I learnt that it is not meant for faint of heart. For most casual users replacing WD drives with third party drives is impossible.
It is best for most business owner to just buy additional warranty to have peace of mind if any drives were to fail after standard warranty expires.
For more detailed professional review please read
http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_sentinel_dx4000_review
This will give you a baseline idea what to expect with this new model Rackmount RX4100 as these two products are very much the same.