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Join us as we take a look at Western Digital's new SOHO and SMB NAS solution. We go in depth with the Sentinel DX4000, a NAS running a Windows Server OS.
Up to now we've been looking at network storage servers that come with no drives and are produced by a company other than a drive manufacturer. Western Digital are one of the best hard drive manufacturers our there in the market and their recent changes to their product line-up has not only made choosing the right drive for the job easier, but also a lot clearer. When it comes to network storage, WD has three types of drive that are geared for the job, Red, SE and RE. Red drives are still aimed for the home/SOHO user, whilst their enterprise SE and RE drives are optimised for the constant punishment that they will encounter 24x7.
Setting drives aside, WD has now come out with their own NAS solution, optimised for their own drives, in an all-in-one easy to use solution and so we get the Sentinel DX4000. The Sentinel is a first in a line of self designed NAS solutions that can be purchased with drives pre-installed in a variety of capacities, varying from a modest 2TB, right up to a whopping 16TB. Unlike other NAS solutions on the market, one of the main features that sets this system apart from the rest is the use of Windows Storage Server 2008 and a auto configuration process during the initial set-up that automatically builds the drives into a RAID5 array - the preferred choice for NAS solutions as this gives the best data security and will ensure no data is lost, should one drive fail during operation.
With this unit designed specifically for the SMB environment the use of WSS 2008 should allow for seamless integration through active directory and domain configuration and also for those that are at home with Windows, should make maintaining the system a bit more intuitive. With RAID automatically configured based on the number of drives installed, set-up should be easier as mentioned and knowing how well trusted and reliable Western Digital's drives are in the NAS markets with multiple lines of drives targeted at this environment, there is good hope that the system has a lot to give.
Western Digital is continually trying to identify gaps in the market and tailor a solution that fills those gaps by providing drives that deliver the performance and features that are attractive to that market segment. With the recent release of their new Se series of drives, Western digital is bridging the gap between their enterprise Re series and their NAS WD Red series. Essentially, the new Se series is a low end Enterprise drive that provides similar performance of an Re drive with a lower cost per gigabyte (due to it's lower workload rating). On paper, this is a perfect solution SOHO/SMB that are looking for higher reliability and performance over desktop drives, but without the enterprise cost that generally comes with the jump from desktop to enterprise class drives.
The Western Digital Scorpio Black represents a strong contender for "best laptop hard drive on the market" and is surprisingly affordable. Watch us put it through its paces, and see if it lives up to its potential.
With the SSD season slowing down, we finally get to break free and spend some time on other storage technology. The mechanical hard drive world has made some advances in recent months. Some of the biggest news has come from companies like Western Digital increasing the platter density on their disks.
If you are looking for maximum storage capacity in a 2.5” form factor drive which has not only the most storage space to date, but also has out-performed 3.5” drives that has come before it, Western Digital has released their new Scorpio Blue 1 terabyte 2.5” drive. This small form factor has opened a whole new world to laptop users who are looking for storage space that can perform and still have a reasonable price.
Western Digital ushers in the new generation of low power computing with Scorpio Blue hard drive. Today we have the 500GB capacity in for review.
We take a closer look at a speedy laptop 2.5inch hard drive from Western Digital. Spinning at 7200rpm and with 16mb cache onboard it promises to be quite speedy. While not very cheap it does beat new SSD devices by a large margin, 320Gb of fast compact storage for your laptop? Let us put it to the test.
For years notebook users looking for desktop like performance were forced to purchase notebooks that used desktop components like processors and hard drives. The notebook main board and processor have evolved into components that rival their desktop counterparts, but the 2.5" platter based notebook hard drive has taken more time to reach the same speeds when compared to their desktop equivalent.
The 500GB Scorpio Black 2.5'' HDD from Western Digital maintains the performance lead ahead of many similar drives on the market with the same capacity. Being available on the market for about 55 Euros, it goes head to head with the Hitachi 7K500-500 model, outperforming it in some cases.
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