Western Digital WD Sentinel DX4000 Small Business Storage Server Unboxing Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
2,131 words · ~10 min read
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welcome to my unboxing and first look at the small business owner Delight this is
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meant to be a turnkey storage and backup
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and data access solution for small
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businesses who basically don't want to lose all of their data this is the WD
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Sentinel dx4000 we're going to go ahead and get
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it out of the outer brown box and have a look at the inner brown box so that's a
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shipping carton so let's start by saying
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that this thing is not cheap this is a
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value proposition but not a price play this is not really meant for consumers
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to give you guys some idea the 4 tbte skew which is the one that we have here
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is around 800 bucks and moving up to something like a 12 tbte version you'd
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be looking at closer to $1,500 to $2,000 so what's the value proposition
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here well for one thing it includes actually you know what let's let's okay
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you guys will get the value proposition later and I should preface this by
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saying if you want a far more detailed look at this we will be doing a
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follow-up video on the ncixcom channel where we take a much closer look at it
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the product like this is not served correctly by a basic unboxing but we
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might as well film an unboxing if we have to open up the box so uh let's
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start with what WD has to say for themselves on the outside so the package
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contents is the small office storage server AC adapter rg45 cable okay system
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requirements are basically you need an internet connection and a router okay
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that's pretty basic two gigb Ethernet ports two USB 3.0 ports those two gigb
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Ethernet ports are very interesting because they are failsafe which means
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they are redundant so even if you lose an Ethernet port you will not lose
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access to your data uses an Intel atom d525 dual core processor with two gigs
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of RAM and runs Windows storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials now when you break
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down the cost of this unit including the hardware they're using that Intel
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processor as well as Enterprise grade Intel hardware for the rest of the
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infrastructure that supports it plus they've actually got a copy of Windows
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server on it plus some of the other stuff that they include it starts to
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look like a very compelling value supported client operating systems whole
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bunch of operating systems pretty much everything that most people would care about supported web browsers pretty much
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everything most people would care about um network uh Network authentic ah right
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it supports active directory so if you have an existing active directory this
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will integrate easily into that due to its Windows uh due to its Windows basis
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Network protocols okay F raid levels aha raid one and raid five so this is a 4
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tbte skew which means it has two 2 tbte
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WD uh re series drives inside these are
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both 1.2 million hour meantime between failure drives um because this is meant
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as a server not as a consumer product
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and there is no room for failure of data
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in a server so this oh yeah this this
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what's more telling about all of this is what's absent here there's nothing about
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jbod nothing about raid zero nothing
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about anything but raid one and raid five The Sentinel does not support Drive
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configurations that are not safe and redundant so this 4 terab skew will
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automatically be configured in raid one which means that in terms of actual
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usable space we're going to have 2 terabytes to start with and then if we
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add an additional drive we'll go up to 4 terabytes and it'll run in raid five
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automatically it also supports online raid level migration and capacity
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expansion which means I can continue to use my data lbe it at reduced
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performance while I throw in my third drive and upgrade my storage space very
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cool other features share folder level Access Control bare metal backup and
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restore for up to 25 computers oh that's really another really cool thing so the
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way it does Backups is actually purely incremental which means if you have uh
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you know let's say you maxed it out and you've got 25 computers and you've got
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let's say the 12 the 12 terab skew so 8 terab of usable data realistically can
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you back up 25 computers on 8 terabytes no except that you can because it is
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only it is not storing any duplicated data so the Windows operating system
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files for example are only going to be stored
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once and then it can use those same files to restore any of those 25
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computers also when it takes multiple snapshots of a system it's only going to
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copy any changes in the data rather than
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recopying the whole thing so it makes very efficient use of the storage space
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that it has moving right along file
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folder level restore okay front panel LCD for S of staus built in DLNA server
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so yeah so if you do presentations in your office for example so this is not
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the same use of a LNA server that you'd have at home where you want to stream
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videos to your iPad uh not about that it's about you know training videos and
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any other media that you might need for your business not for uh not for home
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use okay USB UPS support okay so
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supports uh USB ups and check this out
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guys so this thing is serious business
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so with an let's let's let's start with you know what no let's do accessories
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first so there's your inter there's your Ethernet cable there's your power
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brick look at that fsp no no name power
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brick okay there's your cable for that
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and that's pretty much it technical support and warranty guide okay that
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might be important you want to hold on to this especially if you're a business user now WD has designed this thing from
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the ground up to be as simple as possible so you don't necessarily have
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to have an IT guy at your business in order to use this now we're going to be
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testing it and making sure that that's actually the case but WD seems very
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confident that almost anyone can use it here's an administrator's quick install
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guide which explains a little bit about what the Sentinel is all about and how
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to use it shows you how to connect it shows you how to configure it okay so
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this is uh not all English actually oh it's relatively quick so it's only a few
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steps how to connect your computers to it including different
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os's uh how to authenticate and uh join
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or and connect to the server okay so
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what makes this server grade Hardware we got a cooling fan servers need cooling
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that's good we've also got dual power in
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these are failsafe which means if you buy an additional power brick even if
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your power brick fails even if your internal power supply on the Sentinel
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fails you will not experience any downtime two USB 3.0 ports for auxiliary
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storage as well as for you know uh running a UPS over USB and then there
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are your dual again fail safe gigabit Ethernet
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connections um on the side you got some ventilation holes on the other side you
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got some more ventilation holes on the bottom you don't see anything really out
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of the ordinary actually hold on a sec so what makes this thing you know really
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Enterprise grade server grade a few things there are your redundant power
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supply inputs so if you grab yourself an additional power supply making sure that
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you use the appropriate uh the appropriate spec for your power grip you
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will actually experience no downtime in the event of a failure even of the
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internal uh components that are on the other side here so that's pretty cool
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there's your USB ports for any you know
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additional functionality you need whether it's using it as a print server
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or whether it's uh using a ups for backup and there are your fail safe dual
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gigabit Ethernet ports we've also got a cooling fan on the back as well as your
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serial number and any information Kensington lock spot is right here some
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ventilation holes on the side some ventilation holes on the other side
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especially if you load this thing up with four drives you're going to want it reasonably well ventilated on the front
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you can see it opens up here and there is a drive so let's not fuss with that
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one let's instead pull out one of the empty ones so in terms of Drive mounting
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it's actually very straightforward now this is cool because our Sentinel is uh
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is a is an uh sorry a 4 gig or 4 tbte
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but WD sent us an additional drive now it should be noted that it is a special
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skew that goes into the Sentinel WD is taking the data security of small
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businesses very seriously you can't just use any re Drive there's uh there's a
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matrix uh available I think it's online which shows you which drives you can use
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in order to upgrade the storage of your Sentinel so for the same reason it does
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not support running outside of raid 1 or Raid 5 it does not support
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non-enterprise grade hard drives okay
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you're not this is not meant to be a cheap NAS where you're using consumer
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grade hardware for a business use this
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is a business class piece of hardware so
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anyway they sent us an additional 2 tab drive and the upgrade process is as
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simple as even if the machine is powered on lining it up there's no mounting
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screws no nothing dropping it in I mean
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don't drop it be careful it's a hard drive hold on ah there we go pressing it
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in and closing it that is the upgrade process you can do it while it's on and
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it won't even affect your ability to access your data and it's going to start
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putting this in raid five mode which will double our available capacity by
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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
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running in raid one mode uh when we do our full Tech tips before we uh go much
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further into that okay so there's on the front we've
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also got our LCD readout we've got activity LEDs for the four drives as
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well as navigation buttons for here as well as a power button so that's you
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know what let's call that it for the unboxing and I want you guys to
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definitely check out the full video on this on ncixcom maybe this isn't for you
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but if you're like the tech it guy in family you know anyone who has a small
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business slick was showing me some pretty terrifying statistics it was
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something in the neighborhood of 40 to 60% of small businesses never open their
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doors again after a catastrophic data
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loss think about that for a second and if you know anyone who has a small
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business where they're still using you know oh I don't have a thumb drive on me
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but where they're still using thumb drives to move critical business data
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around it's not the right way to go thumb drives can fail I personally had
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one fail a little while ago that was very inconvenient for me this gives
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everyone remote access to the data they need you can set everything up based on
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which users have access to what and when and all of all those kinds of settings
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this is more along the lines of what people should be using so thank you for checking out this unboxing and first
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look and don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech tips for unboxings reviews and
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other computer videos I forgot what to say for a sec