Western Digital has been expanding its presence in the network attached storage market, with a handful of products intended to appeal to the home user, as well as few more intended to appeal to small to medium businesses. A few years back they launched the Sentinel DX4xxx series of 4-bay Windows storage servers, and in this review we will be taking a look at the latest offering in this series - the 16TB Sentinel DX4200, which is shown in the promotional image below.



The compact housing of the Sentinel DX4200 may look similar to many other 4-bay NAS servers on the market, but there are many differences beyond the fact that this one runs Windows (Windows Server 2012 R2 to be specific). We will cover the finer points of the Sentinel DX4200 over the course of this review, but first let's look at some published data on it, as taken from the official product page on the Western Digital website. This is far from comprehensive, so please visit the link provided for even more details on this product.

Features and Specifications:

Hardware:
» Available models:
   » WDBRZD0080KBK-NESN - 8 TB
   » WDBRZD0160KBK-NESN - 16 TB
» Form factor: 4-bay desktop
» CPU: Intel Atom C2338 1.7 GHz dual core processor
» Memory: 4 GB ECC (expandable to 16 GB)
» 3.5” Data drives (included): 2 or 4 (field upgradeable)
» 2.5” Boot drive: 1 x 500GB (Hardware RAID 1 Ready) with option to add a second boot drive
» USB ports: USB 3.0 x4
» Network interfaces: 2 x 1 Gigabit (redundant)
» Panel display: LCD screen
» Redundant Power Capable: Yes
» Power Supply: Power Supply (DC in) x 2, 1 adapter

Operating System:
» Operating system: Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 Workgroup
» Disk redundancy: Windows Storage Spaces

Storage Services:
» File storage (NAS): NFS, CIFS/SMB v3.0
» Block storage (SAN): iSCSI target and initiator
» Server backup and recovery: Back up your appliance to a USB drive, a drive on the network, or the cloud
» Client backup and recovery: 25 licenses of WD Smartware Pro backup
» Maximum users: 50 users

Data Security:
» Authentication: Local authentication & Active Directory Join
» Remote access:
   » Via FTP/FTPS
   » Remote Desktop

Pricing:
» MSRP, worldwide in USD:
   » 8 TB $1,699
   » 16 TB $2,199

We will be taking a look at part number WDBRZD0160KBK-NESN, which includes four 4TB drives and the $2,199 MSRP listed above. Taking a look at the list above shows that there are four 3.5" hard drives available for your storage array, as well as another 2.5" drive which houses the operating system. In addition, you can add a second 2.5" drive to configure the boot array in RAID. The system should have plnety of power with a dual core ATOM processor and 4GB of DDR3 memory which happens to have ECC (Error-correcting code) to eliminate data corruption that wouldn't be handled by a typical NAS using basic laptop memory.

Other unique, business friendly items pop up on the list, too - including the presence of redundant Gigabit network adapters and redundant power supplies. Couple all of this with four of Western Digital's 4TB SE hard drives (designed for high demand, 24/7 operation) and it is clear that the Western Digital Sentinel DX4200 is provisioned well beyond the specifications of other NAS servers which just might happen to look similar.