Model: Western Digital My Cloud DL4100 24TB Network Attached Storage
Manufacturer: Western Digital
Provided By: Western Digital
As one of the biggest names in the storage industry, Western Digital doesn't need much of an introduction. Founded in 1970, the company got its start by manufacturing calculator chips. As time went on, Western Digital expanded into the PC market, adding floppy and hard disc controllers to its product lineup. It wasn't until 1988 that it introduced its "Centaur" series of hard drives. Since then, the company has grown to become the world's second largest manufacturer of hard drives. Western Digital currently offers a wide range of internal and external hard drives as well as a growing number of multimedia devices, SSDs and network storage solutions.
In the fall of 2013, Western Digital launched its My Cloud family of personal cloud solutions. The first in this series was simply named the My Cloud. This easy to use, single bay NAS device gave consumers the ability to keep media and files safe at home on their own physical drive and then access them over the Internet. The My Cloud could also be used to backup a user's computers and digital files and serve as a home's digital entertainment hub to stream audio and videos. WD soon followed up with a number of two and four-bay NAS devices. In addition to the consumer friendly Mirror, the company introduced its prosumer-oriented My Cloud Expert Series which featured advanced backup and serving options as well as support for third party apps.
Along with two new additions to its My Cloud Expert Series, WD recently launched its new My Cloud Business Series which includes the two-bay DL2100 and the four-bay DL4100. Built to provide the reliability, security and scalability small business customers need, the DL2100 and DL4100 are powered by Intel Atom dual-core processors and are equipped with up to 2GB of RAM, dual gigabit ethernet and power ports with failover capability, and up to 24TB of storage. Both devices run WD's Linux-based My Cloud OS and feature business-ready capabilities including iSCSI target and initiator, replication and file synchronization, integrated FTP, WebDAV server, SSH shell, and Microsoft Active Directory support. To keep your data safe, the DL2100 and DL4100 also offer AES 256-bit volume encryption as well as multiple backup and RAID options.
For this review, WD sent us the four-bay DL4100. The device came equipped with an Intel Atom C2338 1.7 GHz processor, 2GB of RAM and four of the company's 6TB RED hard drives for a total capacity of 24TB.
Needless to say, this is only a taste of what WD's My Cloud Business Series has to offer. To give you an idea of what to expect, we'll take a look at the DL4100's features and then put it through its paces to see how it performs. Does WD's new four-bay NAS have what it takes? Keep reading as we find out.
