Western Digital Sentinel DX4200 review

It’s good value but WD’s Sentinel DX4200 fails to impress as a backup appliance

IT Pro Verdict

The Sentinel DX4200 scores for ease of use and offers a generous storage capacity for the price. It works hand in glove with Windows networks but performance is a mixed bag and you should ignore the buggy SmartWare Pro software

Reasons to buy
  • +

    Easy deployment, Good value, High storage capacity, Windows Storage Spaces, SFF boot disk

Reasons to avoid
  • -

    SmartWare Pro software of limited value, Parity disks hurt performance

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Software features

The DX4200 runs the Workgroup Edition of WSS and is good for up to 50 users a doubling over the DX4000. There are some provisos, though, as it can only join an existing Active Directory domain, doesn't support the Hyper-V role and is stripped of Microsoft's global data deduplication feature.

After attaching a local monitor, keyboard and mouse, we ran through a quick start wizard which just sets the language and asks for a password to secure administrative access. After a reboot, you can enable email alerting and apply WD's software updates.

The DX4200 is app sparse as you only get WD's StorCentral which provides a basic dashboard showing storage status, alerts and system utilisation graphs. When we wanted to configure storage it simply stepped aside and handed us over to the Windows Server Manager interface.

The physical drives are placed in a storage pool within which you create virtual disks

Dave Mitchell
Dave Mitchell

Dave is an IT consultant and freelance journalist specialising in hands-on reviews of computer networking products covering all market sectors from small businesses to enterprises. Founder of Binary Testing Ltd – the UK’s premier independent network testing laboratory - Dave has over 45 years of experience in the IT industry.

Dave has produced many thousands of in-depth business networking product reviews from his lab which have been reproduced globally. Writing for ITPro and its sister title, PC Pro, he covers all areas of business IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, network security, data protection, cloud, infrastructure and services.

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