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
Encryption Support Evaluation
Consumers looking for encryption capabilities can opt to encrypt a iSCSI share with TrueCrypt or some in-built encryption mechanism in the client OS. However, if requirements dictate that the data must be shared across multiple users / computers, relying on encryption in the NAS is the best way to move forward. Most NAS vendors use the industry-standard 256-bit AES encryption algorithm. One approach is to encrypt only a particular shared folder while the other approach is to encrypt the full volume. Western Digital supports encryption on a volume basis only.
On the hardware side, encryption support can be in the form of specialized hardware blocks in the SoC (common in ARM / PowerPC based NAS units). In x86-based systems, accelerated encryption support is dependent on whether the AES-NI instruction is available on the host CPU. Rangeley SoCs have AES-NI support and the performance difference between the encrypted and non-encrypted volumes can be expected to be reasonable.
Read transactions don't have much penalty, but writes to encrypted volumes are much slower compared to non-encrypted volumes. For example, there is a 20 MBps difference in our standard robocopy test of writing a Blu-ray folder to the NAS. Compared to other NAS units, the raw numbers are very good, thanks to the hardware acceleration available. If other Rangeley-based units such as the Synology DS415+ or the Seagate NAS Pro 4-bay are considered, the numbers are more or less the same.
In our first pass with the NASPT benchmark, we saw that the mapped CIFS share from the encrypted volume randomly disconnected from the client during the middle of the fourth pass (the NASPT batch run has five passes of each test). Unfortunately, this was again not a repeatable issue, as our second batch run completed without problems.
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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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