Review: Western Digital DL4100

Introduction and specs

As someone who works in technology and does a ton of work at home, I always perform backups on my computers. I have external drives, I have internal RAIDs, and I have cloud backups, but they always require manual setup. I live in a world where everything seems to be automated and finding a way to simplify backup and transfer processes is a must.

Well, there is a solution - enter the Western Digital My Cloud DL4100 Network Attached Storage (NAS), which offers the options and features required to fit the needs of many small businesses, web developers, freelancers, photographers, and even some medium-sized businesses.

The DL4100 comes in several different formats. It comes in a standard diskless model ($529.99, £356.57, AU$689.52), an 8TB model ($849.99, £571.87, AU$1105.57), a 16TB model ($1,169.99, £787.07, AU$1522.17), and a behemoth 24TB model ($1,529.99, £1029.24, AU$1990.53).

The price might be high, but if you're running a business at home, a small start-up, or if you're a freelancer, then all of your data is critical, and you will want an easy-to-use, reliable backup solution. The DL4100 is an investment that is definitely worth making.

Specs

The Western Digital My Cloud DL4100 NAS is pretty heavy at 14.03 lbs (6.36 kg). The dimensions of the DL4100 are 5.82 inches (147.8 mm) in height, by 8.51 inches (216.1 mm) deep, and 4.28 inches (108.6 mm) wide. The DL4100 is no taller or wider than a mini desktop and I found that hiding it near my cable modem was easy to do.

The NAS supports up to four drives with four drive bays. You can also buy a diskless model and provide your own hard drives or purchase different models that come with the drives. I received the 8TB model with RAID-1 configuration drives that are combined as one volume for redundancy. RAID-1 configuration means that you have one volume on two hard drives, which enables the hard drives to replicate. This is a neat feature because if one hard drive fails, your data is still saved. You can configure this NAS in a RAID-0 (striped, where data is split on two drives so that it reads the data faster but without redundancy), RAID-5 and RAID-10, but more on that later.

The DL4100 has a lot of cool features, such as a web-based panel where you can set users, shares, permissions, RAID types, and backups. More importantly, the web-based panel features integrated web-apps to back up with cloud services (such as AWS) or integrate with Dropbox or Box.

The Western Digital My Cloud DL4100 NAS has two gigabit ethernet ports, three USB 3.0 Ports, one USB 2.0 Port, and two AC/Adapter connections for redundancy. This is a really sweet feature that allows you to be able to connect this to separate power sources as well as network sources. While this might not be applicable in a home-office setting, it is something that is useful for those who rely on very reliable backups. This feature ensures the DL4100 will always be powered on and is seemingly fault tolerant, meaning it won't fail if, say, a switch or a power cable were to break.

There is an LCD screen on the front panel of the device that tells you the IP address, status of the RAID, hard drives, and other important basic information. What I also like are the LEDs under each individual drive bay that will glow orange if there is a problem.

The Western Digital My Cloud DL4100 NAS is powered by an Intel Atom 1.7 GHz C2337 dual-core processor and comes with 2GB DDR3 memory stock. You can upgrade the NAS to use 6GB DDR3 Ram to improve system performance if needed.

Performance and verdict

The DL4100 NAS has a plethora of features on the software side that allow you to use this as just a redundant backup drive or to turn the device into an Active Directory with encrypted volumes that backup regularly to Amazon AWS's S3 storage. You can even host an FTP server directly from the device with no extra software, and share files with clients and coworkers remotely. This NAS supports multiple network file service protocols, so there is no need to worry about configuration for different machines as it supports the almost defunct AFP, SMB, NFSv3 for Linux users, it can do DFS (Microsoft Distributed File System) for those in a Microsoft Domain, and can be a WebDAV server.

The abundance of apps allow you to connect the DL4100 to your website (Joomla, Wordpress), to your torrents (Transmission), to P2P clients (aMule), and to a phpMYAdmin connector for account management. You can even stream content from your DL4100 to your TV by installing IceCast directly on the NAS and configuring it from there.

The DL4100 can also create iSCSI targets and automatically copy information from HTTP sites. You can mount other external USB hard drives and it will back them up or auto-share them on the network regardless of whether or not one external drive is a Windows NTFS and another is a Mac OS X HFS+. No need to format and worry about data, the Western Digital My Cloud DL4100 NAS handles it with ease.

Testing

Setting the device up couldn't be easier - you plug in the power, plug in the network, and just point your web browser to the setup page and it will automatically walk you through creating a password, setting up a user account, and bringing you to the splash screen. Once logged in, you can see the performance, the disk space, etc.

I hooked up the DL4100 to DynDNS, turned on FTP access, set up email and SMS alerts in case the system failed (so awesome), and NTP Service. I did this so I can connect to my device remotely on my iPhone, my Droid Tablet, or my computer with ease. I also made it so that I can connect with some friends of mine to share pictures of a trip we went on together (I just uploaded a folder and sent my friends the FTP information. It went very smoothly).

After that, I set up my storage on the NAS. I used the 8TB drive, which comes with two 4TB drives, I configured them to be RAID-1 so I can have redundant drives. I didn't create users or extra folders - it is easy to do - because I wanted to see file transfer speeds. I have an 8TB RAID array in my gaming tower, and I have some big data to transfer. Unfortunately, I found this confusing to set up. You need to download Western Digital's My Cloud and SmartWare apps (both for Windows and Mac OS X) to perform a direct backup. The My Cloud app connects the drive and the SmartWare allows you to do direct Backups. So, I ran my 3TB backup of miscellaneous files, including some major file sizes, and it took roughly 10 hours to complete because the transfer killed my wireless network.

My router and my computer feature 802.11ac Wi-Fi, so if you are using G or N then expect this process to take a lot longer. If you are connected directly to the device using Gigabit Ethernet then your connections will be far better. Also, I am running RAID-1 which means that the files are written twice.

Doing a Read/Write test was difficult as I couldn't get the DL4100 NAS to mount to my computer plugged in via USB. I downloaded a program called Parkdale and ran a couple of tests on read/write speeds over the network. Here was its performance:

100 MB File

• Read speed was 96.9 MByte/sec


• Write speed was 106.4 MByte/sec

250 MB File

• Read speed was 117.8 MByte/sec


• Write speed was 92.6 MByte/sec

1 GB File

• Read speed was 96.9 MByte/sec


• Write speed was 106.4 MByte/sec

4 GB File

• Read speed was 91.5 MByte/sec


• Write speed was 69.9 MByte/sec

The speeds are not bad, but what I did find is that the bigger the file, the better chance of losing wireless connectivity. For example, backing up 100 20MB files performed way better than, say, backing up one 30GB file.

Verdict

The DL4100 does nearly everything well. I wasn't a huge fan of the web interface, and large transfers crushed my Wi-Fi, but other than that, every task I conducted on the device performed admirably. There are definitely some features I would improve for the next release, but the specs, the design and the functionality of the DL4100 are top-notch.

We liked

It is so easy to set this machine up. Once you have all your settings in place, and if you're not on Wi-Fi, the Western Digital My Cloud DL4100 NAS just runs. Period.

The DL4100 NAS is a business class NAS through and through. It comes with a ton of cool features that are perfect for a wide range of NAS users, from the novice to the expert. The addition of integrated apps, the ability to set up alerts via SMS and email if the device has a problem, the ability to connect it anywhere - amazing.

We disliked

Using this over Wi-Fi is annoying. The DL4100 cuts out from time-to-time depending on the volume and weight of the data you are trying to back up.

I don't really like the web interface. In terms of look and feel, it's fine, but I found it really difficult to actually use. It took forever to load when I made a setting change, or my network would knock out, and I would have to manually reconnect to the web interface continuously. It's not that the interface is awful in conception or execution, but I found that the performance was not up to par with what the DL4100 offers.

Final verdict

The Western Digital My Cloud DL4100 NAS is an impressive machine that offers a ton of features. As long as you keep it plugged in via ethernet you will be able to perform an abundance of tasks - from transferring files to backing up data to streaming content - without having to manually log each and every step. Although the price is somewhat high, the DL4100 is an investment that home and small office users would be wise to make.

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