welcome to my unboxing and first look at the small business owner Delight this is
meant to be a turnkey storage and backup
and data access solution for small
businesses who basically don't want to lose all of their data this is the WD
Sentinel dx4000 we're going to go ahead and get
it out of the outer brown box and have a look at the inner brown box so that's a
shipping carton so let's start by saying
that this thing is not cheap this is a
value proposition but not a price play this is not really meant for consumers
to give you guys some idea the 4 tbte skew which is the one that we have here
is around 800 bucks and moving up to something like a 12 tbte version you'd
be looking at closer to $1,500 to $2,000 so what's the value proposition
here well for one thing it includes actually you know what let's let's okay
you guys will get the value proposition later and I should preface this by
saying if you want a far more detailed look at this we will be doing a
follow-up video on the ncixcom channel where we take a much closer look at it
the product like this is not served correctly by a basic unboxing but we
might as well film an unboxing if we have to open up the box so uh let's
start with what WD has to say for themselves on the outside so the package
contents is the small office storage server AC adapter rg45 cable okay system
requirements are basically you need an internet connection and a router okay
that's pretty basic two gigb Ethernet ports two USB 3.0 ports those two gigb
Ethernet ports are very interesting because they are failsafe which means
they are redundant so even if you lose an Ethernet port you will not lose
access to your data uses an Intel atom d525 dual core processor with two gigs
of RAM and runs Windows storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials now when you break
down the cost of this unit including the hardware they're using that Intel
processor as well as Enterprise grade Intel hardware for the rest of the
infrastructure that supports it plus they've actually got a copy of Windows
server on it plus some of the other stuff that they include it starts to
look like a very compelling value supported client operating systems whole
bunch of operating systems pretty much everything that most people would care about supported web browsers pretty much
everything most people would care about um network uh Network authentic ah right
it supports active directory so if you have an existing active directory this
will integrate easily into that due to its Windows uh due to its Windows basis
Network protocols okay F raid levels aha raid one and raid five so this is a 4
tbte skew which means it has two 2 tbte
WD uh re series drives inside these are
both 1.2 million hour meantime between failure drives um because this is meant
as a server not as a consumer product
and there is no room for failure of data
in a server so this oh yeah this this
what's more telling about all of this is what's absent here there's nothing about
jbod nothing about raid zero nothing
about anything but raid one and raid five The Sentinel does not support Drive
configurations that are not safe and redundant so this 4 terab skew will
automatically be configured in raid one which means that in terms of actual
usable space we're going to have 2 terabytes to start with and then if we
add an additional drive we'll go up to 4 terabytes and it'll run in raid five
automatically it also supports online raid level migration and capacity
expansion which means I can continue to use my data lbe it at reduced
performance while I throw in my third drive and upgrade my storage space very
cool other features share folder level Access Control bare metal backup and
restore for up to 25 computers oh that's really another really cool thing so the
way it does Backups is actually purely incremental which means if you have uh
you know let's say you maxed it out and you've got 25 computers and you've got
let's say the 12 the 12 terab skew so 8 terab of usable data realistically can
you back up 25 computers on 8 terabytes no except that you can because it is
only it is not storing any duplicated data so the Windows operating system
files for example are only going to be stored
once and then it can use those same files to restore any of those 25
computers also when it takes multiple snapshots of a system it's only going to
copy any changes in the data rather than
recopying the whole thing so it makes very efficient use of the storage space
that it has moving right along file
folder level restore okay front panel LCD for S of staus built in DLNA server
so yeah so if you do presentations in your office for example so this is not
the same use of a LNA server that you'd have at home where you want to stream
videos to your iPad uh not about that it's about you know training videos and
any other media that you might need for your business not for uh not for home
use okay USB UPS support okay so
supports uh USB ups and check this out
guys so this thing is serious business
so with an let's let's let's start with you know what no let's do accessories
first so there's your inter there's your Ethernet cable there's your power
brick look at that fsp no no name power
brick okay there's your cable for that
and that's pretty much it technical support and warranty guide okay that
might be important you want to hold on to this especially if you're a business user now WD has designed this thing from
the ground up to be as simple as possible so you don't necessarily have
to have an IT guy at your business in order to use this now we're going to be
testing it and making sure that that's actually the case but WD seems very
confident that almost anyone can use it here's an administrator's quick install
guide which explains a little bit about what the Sentinel is all about and how
to use it shows you how to connect it shows you how to configure it okay so
this is uh not all English actually oh it's relatively quick so it's only a few
steps how to connect your computers to it including different
os's uh how to authenticate and uh join
or and connect to the server okay so
what makes this server grade Hardware we got a cooling fan servers need cooling
that's good we've also got dual power in
these are failsafe which means if you buy an additional power brick even if
your power brick fails even if your internal power supply on the Sentinel
fails you will not experience any downtime two USB 3.0 ports for auxiliary
storage as well as for you know uh running a UPS over USB and then there
are your dual again fail safe gigabit Ethernet
connections um on the side you got some ventilation holes on the other side you
got some more ventilation holes on the bottom you don't see anything really out
of the ordinary actually hold on a sec so what makes this thing you know really
Enterprise grade server grade a few things there are your redundant power
supply inputs so if you grab yourself an additional power supply making sure that
you use the appropriate uh the appropriate spec for your power grip you
will actually experience no downtime in the event of a failure even of the
internal uh components that are on the other side here so that's pretty cool
there's your USB ports for any you know
additional functionality you need whether it's using it as a print server
or whether it's uh using a ups for backup and there are your fail safe dual
gigabit Ethernet ports we've also got a cooling fan on the back as well as your
serial number and any information Kensington lock spot is right here some
ventilation holes on the side some ventilation holes on the other side
especially if you load this thing up with four drives you're going to want it reasonably well ventilated on the front
you can see it opens up here and there is a drive so let's not fuss with that
one let's instead pull out one of the empty ones so in terms of Drive mounting
it's actually very straightforward now this is cool because our Sentinel is uh
is a is an uh sorry a 4 gig or 4 tbte
but WD sent us an additional drive now it should be noted that it is a special
skew that goes into the Sentinel WD is taking the data security of small
businesses very seriously you can't just use any re Drive there's uh there's a
matrix uh available I think it's online which shows you which drives you can use
in order to upgrade the storage of your Sentinel so for the same reason it does
not support running outside of raid 1 or Raid 5 it does not support
non-enterprise grade hard drives okay
you're not this is not meant to be a cheap NAS where you're using consumer
grade hardware for a business use this
is a business class piece of hardware so
anyway they sent us an additional 2 tab drive and the upgrade process is as
simple as even if the machine is powered on lining it up there's no mounting
screws no nothing dropping it in I mean
don't drop it be careful it's a hard drive hold on ah there we go pressing it
in and closing it that is the upgrade process you can do it while it's on and
it won't even affect your ability to access your data and it's going to start
putting this in raid five mode which will double our available capacity by
switching from raid 1 to raid 5 I'm going to take that out for now though because we do want to have a look at it
running in raid one mode uh when we do our full Tech tips before we uh go much
further into that okay so there's on the front we've
also got our LCD readout we've got activity LEDs for the four drives as
well as navigation buttons for here as well as a power button so that's you
know what let's call that it for the unboxing and I want you guys to
definitely check out the full video on this on ncixcom maybe this isn't for you
but if you're like the tech it guy in family you know anyone who has a small
business slick was showing me some pretty terrifying statistics it was
something in the neighborhood of 40 to 60% of small businesses never open their
doors again after a catastrophic data
loss think about that for a second and if you know anyone who has a small
business where they're still using you know oh I don't have a thumb drive on me
but where they're still using thumb drives to move critical business data
around it's not the right way to go thumb drives can fail I personally had
one fail a little while ago that was very inconvenient for me this gives
everyone remote access to the data they need you can set everything up based on
which users have access to what and when and all of all those kinds of settings
this is more along the lines of what people should be using so thank you for checking out this unboxing and first
look and don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech tips for unboxings reviews and
other computer videos I forgot what to say for a sec