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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Storage spaces

Hardware RAID is not available for the four main drives which are configured as Microsoft Storage Spaces. These combine selected drives into a single pool which can be expanded on the fly into any spare ones.

Within our four-drive pool, we created virtual disks and chose from two- or three-way mirrors or parity resiliency which is essentially software managed RAID5. An advantage of Storage Pools is thin provisioning can be enabled on a virtual disk and will apply to all NAS shares and iSCSI targets within it.

Before creating NAS shares, you'll need to install the File and iSCSI Services feature in the File and Services Role as this isn't preloaded. For IP SANs, we also had to install the iSCSI Target Server feature as well. These aren't issues though, as when we attempted to create our first share or iSCSI target, it fired up wizards which loaded the features for us.

During virtual disk creation you can choose from three levels of resiliency with mirrors offering the best performance

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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