Western Digital My Cloud DL4100 review

The future looks cloudy for WD’s new business NAS appliance

IT Pro Verdict

Not the fastest or best featured NAS appliance but it’s cheap and cloud access is a cinch to configure

Reasons to buy
  • +

    Good value; Easy installation; Simplified cloud access; Quiet

Reasons to avoid
  • -

    Short on storage features; Unimpressive backup performance

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Backup features and performance

For speed testing, we mapped a share to an E5-2600 v3 Xeon server and saw drag and drop copies of a 50GB file return sustained read and write rates of 112MB/sec and 104MB/sec. Real world backup operations were less impressive as a copy of a 22.4GB folder with 10,500 small files averaged only 41MB/sec.

Using SmartWare Pro to run a scheduled copy of the same test folder returned a meagre 10MB/sec. Fortunately, we only needed to do this once as it then runs subsequent incrementals.

The DL4100 also supports IP SANs and CHAP authentication but features such as thin provisioning, LUN backup and snapshots are not present. Even so, performance was good with a 500GB target delivering Iometer raw read and write rates of 100MB/sec and 98MB/sec.

It's slow but the SmartWare Pro software provides some useful workstation backup features

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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