WD My Cloud DL4100 Business NAS Review
Power Consumption and Final Thoughts
When it comes to power consumption the WD My Cloud DL4100 8TB really varied depending on what you are doing. When the system is shut down we found that it leeches 2.5 Watts of power from the wall. We left the power brick in our Watts Up? Pro ES power meter and the reading dropped to 0.0 Watts so it looks like the Wake-on-LAN feature draws three Watts of power when the DL4100 is simply plugged into the wall. Once the system is turned on we found that the power draw hit almost 43 Watts when the hard drives were spinning up and the system was going through the boot process where the systems fan is spinning at high as well before the fan profile is loaded. Once the system settles down you are looking at roughly 20 Watts of power in an active idle state or just about 12 Watts with the NAS in standby mode. When a single user is moving a file we recorded 23 Watts of power was used when lightly using the RAID 1 array. These aren’t bad power numbers, but keep in mind this is with just two WD Red 4TB hard drives inside along with the internal motherboard. If you populate all four bays with drives on a higher capacity DL4100 your power numbers will be higher than what we are seeing on the WD My Cloud DL4100 8TB model that we are looking at here today.
Final Thoughts and Conclusions:
The WD My Cloud DL4100 was found to be a well designed 4-bay NAS solution that was very easy to use with solid performance and is backed up by a nice 3-year warranty. The overall performance we saw from a single user perspective was impressive and the WD DL4100 8TB Business Class NAS often topped out and was limited by the maximum speed of our Gigabit network. Being maxed out by the top speed of your network is seldom a bad thing when it comes to talking about NAS performance, but it does show that the need for 10 Gigabit Ethernet is here for the prosumer and small business market. Nonetheless the DL4100 was able to stream multiple 4K Ultra HD videos across our network to three different clients while we mixed in some additional traffic just fine.
The WD My Cloud DL4100 4-bay NAS will be widely available later this month, but for now can be purchased directly from the WD Store. You start out with a drive-less 0TB model for $529.99 and then jump up to an 8TB version for $849.99, 16TB for $1169.99 and a 24TB model for $1529.99. We looked at the WD My Cloud DL4100 8TB version that is sold under part number WDBNEZ0080KBK-NESN in this review. The WD My Cloud DL4100 8TB NAS proved to be a solid solution, but note that it only comes with two 4TB WD Red drives with a RAID 1 array. If you wanted to run RAID 5 out of the box you’ll need to go with the more expensive 16TB and 24TB models.
At the end of the day the My Cloud lineup has been bolstered by the the addition of the WD My Cloud Business Series that consists of the DL2100 (2-bay) and DL4100 (4-bay) NAS solutions. The Intel Atom C2338 dual-core processor and 2GB of DDR3 memory really make this a snappy little box and along with the WD Red drives you can easily see why WD rated this NAS as having read and write speeds of 117 MB/s and 107 MB/s. If you are looking to add a NAS to your home or small business the WD My Cloud DL4100 is certainly worth consideration as it performs well and doesn’t need an IT department to maintain it!
Legit Bottom Line: The WD My Cloud DL4100 Business NAS is a nice step up from the Prosumer line that WD launched in 2013!