Western Digital ShareSpace 4 TB 4-Bay Gigabit Ethernet Network Attached Storage with RAID 5 - WDA4NC40000N

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Amazon price: $519.00 Prices subject to change. Used price: $399.95 Buy Now at Amazon

Binding: Electronics
Brand: Western Digital
EAN: 0718037733647
Format: CD
Label: Western Digital
Dimension: 9.45 x 12.99 x 11.42 inches
Manufacturer: Western Digital
Model: WDA4NC40000N
Publisher: Western Digital
Studio: Western Digital
Warranty: 3 years warranty

Features and Descriptions

• Box Contents - Network storage system with RAID, Ethernet cable, 2 hard drive mounting rails, AC adapter, Software CD, and Quick Install Guide
• Compatibility - Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Mac OS X 10.4.11+, and 10.5.2+
• Dimensions - Height 7.73 x Depth 6.30 x Width 7.84 (196.2x160.1x199.2mm)
• Weight - 10.78 pounds (4.9 kg)

This high-speed network-attached storage system with capacities up to 8 TB and a space-saving footprint gives you all the benefits of a big time data center without the need for a big time IT department. Perfect for centralizing and sharing data or streaming media on a small office or home network.

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Ratings & Comments(Average:)

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- WD Sharespace
I purchased this NAS after reading a few reviews and it seemed to be one of the better value for money NAS's on the market, however it has extremely poor read/write speeds and can only support 32 users in Active Directory (Including disabled accounts) You also must have a Windows 2003 Active Directory forrest and schema so not much good if you have 32 or more user accounts.

WD Recomendations:
Domain Name does not exceed 15 characters (Example: [...])
2003 Active Directory (By default Windows 2003 creates a Windows 2000 Active Directory)
2003 Forest (By default Windows 2003 creates a Windows 2000 Forest)
Domain Users are stored in the default "Users" directory that Active Directory creates
Domain Computers are stored in the default "Computers" directory that Active Directory creates
Domain should have 32 Active Directory users or less

I have since sent this unit back and replaced with a Synology Diskstation DS410

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- WD-is not all bad
I bought the 2 TB Sharespace system and had it hooked up in no time at all. It's a good thing that Windows 7 has XP compatibility software built in or this wouldn't work with Windows 7. I still havent gotten the hang of the downloading the files from the internet as the MIONET service provided is a little complicated at first, but easy to grasp as you pay attention to what you are doing. As I read in some of the other reviews the 4-8TB system is anywhere from $600-$999. I bought the 2TB on sale at $294 here on amazon and purchased 2x 2TB WD HDD ($99 each) that just slide right in and now i have a 6 TB sharespace for under $500. It also let me plug in my 2x 1TB WD MY Book Externals that I already had and i can access them as if it were apart of the sharespace. Now thats 8TB's I dont know what im going to do with it all.

Cons: The data transfer rate is a little on the slow side.

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- Poor / No UPS support
Beware - This NAS advertises itself as offering UPS graceful shutdown, but only a small number of UPS devices are supported. (Search google for WD Knowledge Base 2559)
Of these, the Tripp Lite Internet350U did not work and only showed up as a "Generic UPS", without battery life remaining and any ability to do a graceful shutdown. Furthermore the Firmware version on my Sharespace was more recent than the one available on their support website, which confused the tech support, and made the firmware un-upgradable.

Tech support was a waste of time and finally told me they don't support UPS issues, even after recommending them on their knowledge base. Steer clear of this one.

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- Simple to use but unreliable
This NAS is simple to use via the web interface and gets good throughput with the gigabit interface. Setting up permissions is straight forward and log entries are useful when troubleshooting. Unfortunately the device is NOT reliable. I had it configured in a RAID5 configuration with 4 (1TB) disks and my office experienced a power outage that lasted longer than the backup power supply (UPS) I was using. When I powered the NAS back on it was reachable on the network (via web interface) but it would not recognize my user ID and password and therefore could not access my files (even the ones in the public folder). I contacted WD and they recommended using the reset button located on the back of the unit to reset accounts back to factory default. After doing this the unit no longer booted up successfully and I was not able to access any files. They then told me there was nothing else they could do and offered to RMA a new unit to me. I spent 3 weeks trying to recover my RAID5 array using R-Studio to no avail. The WD technical support was also not able to answer questions (stripe size, boot sequence, etc) on the RAID5 setup which made it impossible to recover my data. I was really disappointed with the quality of their technical support and to see that a power outage would cause the entire unit to fail in a RAID5 configuration.

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- Goodbye Data
Got my new 8TB ShareSpace. Configured it for Raid 5. Setup was somewhat confusing. It's difficult to figure out where to go turn features on/off, but eventually I got used to it. Copied a 500 GB of data to it. It seemed to be working fine. Then one morning, one week after purchase, it was off. When I turned it back on, it reported 2 bad drives. I spent an hour on the phone with the worst tech support ever giving me idiotic suggestions like rebooting my PC to see if the drives somehow come back. Bottom line: WD will replace the bad drives, but my data is gone and they don't care. They have no way to get it back. So now I have to use a third-party company that will charge me between $1000-$3000 to get my data back.

This wouldn't bother me so much if this was just a "normal" hard drive. But this is supposed to be a high-end "safe" place to store lots of data. I would hope that WD would stand behind its product. But they seem to consider this to be just another drive. If it fails, it fails.

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