Western Digital My Cloud DL4100 Business NAS Review
by Ganesh T S on March 4, 2015 5:30 AM EST- Posted in
- NAS
- Storage
- Western Digital
- Enterprise
Miscellaneous Aspects and Final Words
In order to keep testing consistent across all 4-bay units, we performed all our expansion / rebuild testing as well as power consumption evaluation with the unit configured in RAID-5. The disks used for benchmarking (Western Digital WD4000FYYZ) were also used in this section. The table below presents the average power consumption of the unit as well as time taken for various RAID-related activities.
| WD My Cloud DL4100 RAID Expansion and Rebuild / Power Consumption | ||
| Activity | Duration (HH:MM:SS) | Avg. Power (W) |
| Single Disk Init | 00:09:06 | 22.63 W |
| JBOD to RAID-1 Migration | 08:37:27 | 35.34 W |
| RAID-1 (2D) to RAID-5 (3D) Migration | 04:43:33 | 45.31 W |
| RAID-5 (3D) to RAID-5 (4D) Expansion | 18:01:04 | 55.1 W |
| RAID-5 (4D) Rebuild | 08:50:33 | 57.41 W |
The graphs below show the power consumption and rebuild duration when repairing a RAID-5 volume for the various 4-bay NAS units that have been evaluated before.
Even though the power consumption during the rebuild process is high, the time taken is the lowest amongst all the 4-bay NAS units that we have seen so far. That said, the time take for expanding a 3-disk RAID-5 volume to a 4-disk RAID-5 volume is more than double the RAID-5 rebuild time. Usually, we see NAS units have approximately same duration and power consumption for these two activities. The My Cloud OS does have some scope for optimizing the expansion process.
Concluding Remarks
The My Cloud DL4100 fills an important slot in Western Digital's NAS lineup for the SMB / SOHO market. The choice of an Intel Rangeley platform enables very good performance numbers while keeping power consumption numbers reasonable. On the OS side, getting the unit up and running with relay access to the unit / mobile apps support was quite easy.
On the other side, the user experience with the My Cloud OS needs a lot of improvement. For example, navigating the log messages from the dashboard is very cumbersome. The UI and UX are acceptable for a 'My Passport Wireless'-type device, but, for something more complicated like the My Cloud Business Series NAS units, there is scope for improvement. The number of third-party apps available for the My Cloud OS is minimal right now. However, this will definitely improve as the days go by. From WD's side, the firmware needs more QA. In addition, some of the features that were touted at release (such as the daisy-chaining of units using the LAN port) find no mention in the user manual.
At $530 for a diskless unit, the pricing is definitely better than the Synology DS415+ or the QNAP TS-453 Pro. However, for the performance that is on offer, the $480 QNAP TS-451 and the $500 Seagate NAS Pro 4-bay also enter the list of units to be considered. Considered purely on performance or price, the WD My Cloud DL4100 is not an obvious choice. Similar to the Seagate NAS Pro units, the channel support as well as the bundling of hard drives / pre-configured nature of the units can make the My Cloud DL4100 worth considering.
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dreamcat4 - Thursday, March 5, 2015 - link
It does not really seem to go away (ever be removed) the choice of the user to decide the underlying file system. Whether it is to be ZFS or RAID or other possible options such a btrfs etc.If you do want to buy a Synology etc box (which is fine BTW), just be sure to realize that you are usually relying upon a linux RAID-something underneath that. So then that is effectively translates into being your user choice of the underlying filesystem.
It is very hard for individuals to properly compare RAID vs ZFS vs neither (or "other"). Because most of us only get the time to rely upon ONE of those solutions in our NAS device. However if you are sure to keep 1 full backup of all your data, then the reliability aspect. Or the risk of doing RAID rebuilds, silent non-ECC zfs errors, etc. can mostly be entirely negated. And storage process are cheap enough these days to be able to make a full backup. That I recommend above all else because then you only need to compare and choose over the relative advantages of each solution. Which makes the decision a lot easier.
You should never trust a single RAID array or ZFS storage pool to keep you data safe. That includes the user-configuration aspect of such complex filesystems.
dreamcat4 - Thursday, March 5, 2015 - link
Would also like to mention the UFS version 2.01 filesystem. It may not turn out to be suitable for all of your NAS needs. However UFS v2.01 has some unique advantages over other formats. It is properly recognized for both r+w on all of the most popular client platforms: Linux Windows and Mac OS X. Without needing any special driver whatsoever. And that advantage can be particularly helpful in recovery situations (when the other non-storage hardware has failed). So UFS v2.01 is a very good alternative to FAT32, NTFS, EXT, UFS, and HFS+ for those reasons. It's main competitor is FAT32. However unlike FAT32 it has no annoying 4GB file size limit, and comes with journalling.CiccioB - Thursday, March 5, 2015 - link
Is there a plan for the consumer versions (My Cloud/ My Cloud Mirror) to be upgraded soon as well?1DaveN - Thursday, March 5, 2015 - link
I've worked a little with a pre-release one of these, and have several of the similar WD storage boxes. One of the best things about these is that they are quite small, and practically silent. You can put them anywhere - I have two in a shared office, and my office mate would complain about the noise if she noticed it. The build quality is excellent, and they should be widely available, leading to some discounting at places like Amazon.My oldest of these WD boxes dates from the summer of 2011 (if you look on their web site, you'll find a number of different servers that look very similar. Mine runs Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials). That one has been storing daily backups of 16 Windows client PCs since 2011 and I've never had any problems with it whatsoever.
I'm not sure a NAS is a device where performance is the first consideration. At least for me, they're not primary storage where a slow response is keeping me waiting. I tend to use a NAS more for backup or archived file storage where a few seconds one way or the other isn't really noticeable.
jay401 - Friday, March 6, 2015 - link
Anyone know why WD's HDD prices have been shooting upward the last few weeks? 4-6TB Reds have gone up quite a bit. Is there a supply problem?ap90033 - Tuesday, March 10, 2015 - link
Is it me or does this site seem to have about half the reviews and info that it used to?ewanhumphries1706 - Wednesday, December 20, 2017 - link
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