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I want to transplant your storage brains: WD desktop NAS refresh

Puts Storage Spaces on Sentinel, leaves RAID behind

WD has updated its small office Sentinel desktop filer range, adding Windows Storage Server 2012 with its Storage Spaces facility.

The Sentinel storage servers are for small and medium businesses that don’t want or need a full-blown racked NAS system running on X86 processors.

The DX4200 is basically the same as the 4-bay, 2 or 4 x 4TB disk drive DX4000 product, but with a total brain transplant.

Out goes the Atom D525 1.80 GHz 2-core CPU, being replaced by an Atom C2338 1.70 GHz 2-core CPU. And Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials gets replaced with Storage Server 2012 R2 Workgroup.

The Storage Spaces SW replaces the previous RAID levels 1 and 5. It lets you carve out virtual drives from the underlying pool of physical drive capacity. These virtual drives support mirroring, equivalent to RAID 1, or parity striping, like RAID 5.

Here’s a table showing the DX4n00 range:

WD-Sentinel_Storage_servers

WD Sentinel Storage Server range

The drives are 2 or 4TB WD S3 3.5-inch ones, spinning at 7,200rpm.

For some reason WD isn’t yet offering 6TB drives in the product. Having a 24TB maximum capacity instead of 16TB would look like a useful feature.

DX4200

WD Sentinel DX4200

The DX4200 comes with SmartWare Pro Backup and optional DR. It’s orderable now at the WD online store, select retailers and costs $1,699 for 8TB and $2,199 for 16TB (MSRP). ®

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