Western Digital Sentinel DX4000 16TB NAS Review

When testing a device of this sort, the system that we use to test with is not a major factor in its performance. The performance of the NAS box comes down to the network its running on and its own internal hardware. With a device of this sort having so many different applications, Intel’s NASPT software covers all the bases and also gives us a set of results that we will be able to utilise and therefore give a benchmark against other similar systems in the future.

Intel NASPT (Network Attached Storage Performance Toolkit) performs its test by transferring varying sizes and quantities of data to and from the device based on twelve different scenarios.

As part of the testing, the NAS is connected to our core network through a Netgear GS724TPS managed Gigabit switch and then to our test bench to give the best real world set-up test that we can.

The system that we use to run the Intel NASPT software does require us to drop the memory right down to 2GB as any more than this leads to data caching and therefore skews the results from the NAS box.

Typical when I review a NAS I’ll have a number of different RAID levels to select from and test, however with this system coming pre-fitted with four drives and Windows Storage Server automatically setting the system up for RAID5, there is only going to be a little amount of testing that I can carry out this time around.

To keep things simple and rather than having a stack of chart with only a single piece of data on, a screen shot of the NASPT test results will be enough to get an idea of how well the system performs.

Across the board, the Sentinel DX4000 is not the fastest device that we have seen in a RAID5 configuration, but part of this comes down to the 5400RPM drives that are used in the system. The performance across the board is fairly average, but with the inclusion of port trunking and the capability to have up to 25 users connected at once, there possibility of any performance drop is quite low with reasonable speeds a likely prospect.