Western Digital My Cloud DL4100 review
The future looks cloudy for WD’s new business NAS appliance
Not the fastest or best featured NAS appliance but it’s cheap and cloud access is a cinch to configure
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Good value; Easy installation; Simplified cloud access; Quiet
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Short on storage features; Unimpressive backup performance
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
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