Customer Reviews

Western Digital ShareSpace 4 TB 4-Bay Gigabit Ethernet Network Attached Storage

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(26)

 

 

(Note: My review is Mac based, but the Western Digital ShareSpace 4TB 4-Bay NAS RAID supports PCs and Linux as well.)

My history with SOHO NAS so far hasn't been all that good. The WD ShareSpace is the third NAS type device I've owned. The previous two (a 1 TB WD MyBook Pro II used as a NAS device through my Apple Airport Extreme and a 2 TB OWC Raidon NAS/RAID) were both returned. The WD MyBook Pro II had a drive sleep issue with the Airport Extreme. (See below.) The OWC Raidon NAS/RAID couldn't set user permissions properly running as a Mac formatted drive. As for the Western Digital ShareSpace 4TB 4-Bay NAS RAID, so far it appears to be the best of the lot.

After completely setting up the drive yesterday evening (in no more than an hour), overnight I did a complete restore of the 60 GB or so I have backed up of our home business data to the WD ShareSpace. It was seamless. When I woke up this morning all the data was there just as it should be. Then I copied my 47 GB iTunes library over from my Mac Pro to the ShareSpace Public:Shared Music folder. (The shared folders are created by WD and ship with the drive.)

So what do I have?

* Effectively in RAID 5 I have 2.68 TB of available storage (my 60 GB barely touches the surface.)

* I have access to my entire iTunes library from every Mac and PC in the house

I can now have an iTunes server without having to have a Mac acting a server or buying another separate device. The ShareSpace can handle multiple audio streams over the 1 GB/s NAS interface without breaking a sweat. (I have read in the WD FAQ that there is an issue with multiple audio streams and simultaneous file downloads, but I haven't run into this issue yet.) The only downside is, while you can access all the music (including MP3s and DRM AAC,) you can only run iTunes in List View, not Grid or Cover Flow. That's a bit of a bummer, but I expect that this is more of a limitation of iTunes than it is of the ShareSpace.

* Access as Administrator to all the drive shares.

At first this might not sound like a big deal. But unlike my Windows 2000 Advanced Server, all the previous NAS drives I've owned to date wouldn't allow me to access shares that I don't "own." My wife's share, for example, was not accessible to me. So why would I want that anyway? Simply because it makes backing up the entire NAS so much easier. What I've had to do in the past to access all shares for backup was to physically disconnect the NAS drive from the network and attach it via the USB port to my Mac Pro. Doing so overrides the read/write privileges of the NAS because now it appears as just another external drive attached to the Mac Pro. I did my backups and then had to eject the drive from the Mac Pro and reconnect it to the network. It was a bit of a pain. The ShareSpace overcomes this by allowing me to apply Admin privileges to my user account. Now when it's the weekly backup time I can simply mount all the shares on line and do the backup in one fell swoop.

* A green device

To save energy, the ShareSpace spins the four drive's speed down when they are not being used. This is a big improvement over the MyBook Pro II. I wound up sending it back because it completely shut down the drives when they weren't in use and the Airport Extreme couldn't wake them up again.

* A very quiet RAID/NAS

The drive runs very quietly. I can barely hear the fan. If the home office is dead quiet and I get right up next to the ShareSpace, I can hear the clicking of the drive heads as they read and write data--but that's completely tolerable. The Mac Pro, no noise generator itself, is louder than the ShareSpace.

I haven't done any file transfer performance testing yet. However, I do find that the device does well delivering streamed audio (and probably streamed video as well.) From what I've read and experienced with very large file transfers, it doesn't appear that WD hasn't put all that much oomph into the network driver and interface. (Yes, the ShareSpace does support Jumbo Frames over Gigabit Ethernet.) For now I don't plan to post-process any of my RAW files in Photoshop or Lightroom 2 on the ShareSpace. I'll leave that task up to the internal SATA drives in my Mac Pro.

The bottom line may be that the WD ShareSpace is a flexible, easy to manage device with tons of storage. But if you are looking for an absolute speed demon RAID/NAS this may not be your first choice.


Pros:

* Great, great management tools via the web interface.
* Pretty decent management security (log in and HTTPS.)
* Tons and tons of on-line storage.
* RAID 5 capability.
* Very easy drive discovery.
* Bonjour spupport means that there is no need to guess what DHCP IP address has been assigned to the drive.
* No need to be an IT expert to manage the drive.
* Flexible and straightforward account and share management.
* Easy, easy, easy to use.
* 4 TB of RAID 5 for a decent price. Are you kidding me?
* Mostly all metal construction (how rare is that these days?)
* Stable drive enclosure that won't slide around on the desk or table easily.
* Design is okay. A bit techy looking, but it won't offend anyone either.


Cons:

* I'd prefer to have an integrated power supply, although the brick power supply is better and more rugged than most I've seen.
* Let's have "real" documentation included. The "Quick Start" documentation is anemic. The on-line documentation is okay, but it has to be printed for a device this expensive and flexible.
* Virtually no software included. They include a backup application and the documentation on a CD. That's about it. But, to tell the truth I'd rather spend my dollars for the hardware and not for software "throw ins."
* Failed (or added) drive must be Western Digital drives. No other vendors are supported. Boo!
* Case opens like a PC. This is not complex matter, but drive access could have been made easier. (How about a door that swings open? Other vendors have done just that.)
* Drives are not hot swappable.
* File transfer speeds may be on the slow side.


Overall so far: Most of the cons are nits or easy to live with. Highly recommended. All-in-all a very excellent way to provide RAID/NAS for a SOHO environment.

This is more a warning based on the total failure of Western Digital in this product then it is a review.

I purchased a WD Sharespace as a nice home server. It worked well streaming video out over my home net using NFS. Then it failed.

Now, I've been using computers for years. So computer failure after one month is not a huge issue. Happens to the best products. Call up and receive an RMA'd system. Things are going well. Now you have to know two things. One, my system was dead wouldn't get on the network. Two, it is a totally headless system so when it won't even take an IP address from your DHCP it is a brick. So I take my new system, plug it in, configure it. Works great, things are still going well. Put my old drives into the new system so I can save all my data. Now the new system acts just like the old system, curious. Put new drives in old system...system works......seems WD DIDN'T make the firmware and system embedded. It's on the drives! The drives die.....no system.......now I'm worried. Call WD support (ah talking to ESL script readers, THE BEST!) They inform me that nothing is supported and for a lovely fee they will be happy to send me to a data recovery company.

So now the parts you need to know. WD doesn't sell parts for this. They do not have anyway to get the data off in case of drive failure. If anything happens you are dead in the water and not even getting a totally new WD will get your data back. I had assumed that this was and imbedded system with 4 raid 5 drives. Failure of a drive just means that I can recover using the embedded OS. This is not the case, Failure of 1 drive means that you can rebuild the RAID using the OS on the drives themselves but if anything happens beyond that your toast.

If I was an owner (which I am) I'd sell the sharespace double quick and just get a raid card and some drives. A little more messy but when your system fails then you have parts and options. Something you don't have with WD.

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.

First off, I fully agree that WD support is terrible. Like really terrible. I would rather gouge out my own eyes than have to deal with those call center monkeys.

But, I felt the need to chime in here and respond to all the flame posts. In reading through many of these 1-star reviews, it appears there are very few (if any) who understand what RAID is and how it works.

I have read some comments saying things indicating people have taken a 'failed' drive and swapped it around with others already in the array. It's counter intuitive I know, but this will destroy the array. Then they will say "OMG! all my stuff is gone!!".

Of course it is; you did it to yourself. If you ever see an 'failed drive' or 'raid critical' indicator do this first:

Disconnect any logical connections (e.g. mapped drives, shared folders)
Power off the ShareSpace unit
(just to be extra safe...though I think AHCI is in use, which would allow hot-swap)
Remove the drive in question
Recite the Three Laws of Robotics aloud (optional)
Re-insert the supposedly failed drive
Power the unit up again

Often everything will be fine. The warning will still be there, but will go away in about 30 minutes (the 'new' drive is being striped). If, after 30 minutes, the alert is still there you probably *do* have a failed HD. You will need to replacement with another of the same size and speed. Which brings me to another common myth about this unit....

Others have flamed about how you "have to" use only WD drive (I have even read this on 'review' sites), but that is not the case. You can use any brand you want, but anything other than WD will void the warranty (after 90 days, who cares?). I have tried it and it works just fine. Read it for yourself...it's on page 177 of the manual.

Still others claim that things like "You lose one drive and you're totally hosed!". Again, untrue. For a RAID 5 configuration (default out of the box setup), one must simultaneously lose at least two drives in order to lose data. That's the whole point of a RAID 5: parity. I have yanked one of my 4 drives, while the system was running, and everything kept running fine (except for the warning of RAID status being critical). I left it that way all day. I uploaded new files, created new directories, etc..

The Unix OS running the ShareSpace is spanned just like all the other data. From what I understand this is a software RAID (as opposed to having a physical RAID controller on board). That means it needs the OS to remain intact to retain data on the RAID. This is very common, even in an enterprise environment. It is still a 'real' RAID. However, not having a hardware RAID *does* mean there is a higher chance of data loss**; but it's minimal. I have had RAID arrays costing tens of thousands, *with* hardware controllers, fail on me. It happens. But the reason that data loss was not very critical was due to the next (and most important) point...

NEVER rely on any device exclusively! Nothing is immune from a complete failure at any moment. Many of the comments I read have statements in there like "...and we didn't have any backups.." or "...all my [irreplaceable files] were stored there!". If your ShareSpace (or any storage system) completely fails and all the data is permanently inaccessible, it sucks, I know. But if it becomes crisis because that data was "super-important" and the only copy was on your NAS, you have no one to blame but yourself. You know that axiom about eggs and baskets? It applies to data too.

**A decent hardware RAID controller card could *easily* cost more than the entire ShareSpace device...a lot more. It's a consumer-level NAS, not some hardened ultra server.

I've been looking for a cost effective way of storing all my media in a centrally located, secure, and protected fashion. I've looked at servers with hot-swap hard drive slots, USB hard drives (of which I own many), and small/medium NAS boxes. The ones that had all the features I wanted were always way too expensive. The ones that were affordable, didn't offer many features. When I came across the specs for the WD ShareSpace and then I looked at the price, I thought it was perfect. And, so far, it has proved to be a terrific device.

I'm a parent and a technologist. So I collect pictures, short videos, movies, ISO files for OS's, and lots of other documents like PDF's. I've filled up many USB drives, and local drives. I even have an old HP DL 380, which I've outgrown. The good news about the DL380 is that the storage is protected. Unfortunately, the spare parts are very expensive and the capacity the server has is way too small. The point is, I have lots of data and it's spread out all over the place. Some of it isn't protected and hasn't been backed up. I'm a disaster just waiting to happen.

The WD ShareSpace arrived just today. I've managed to run through all the options in the terrific web-based GUI. There are two modes: Basic and Advanced. Basic is great if you just want to store files and will rarely mess with the settings. Advanced let's you do all sorts of cool things. Like enable NFS, FTP, SSL certificates and keys, and a lot of other things.

So far, I've started to copy my music collection to the NAS box. I actually have many collections, but this is the music that I listen to most of the time. It's about 80GB in size. The other two collections total about 400GB in size. The copy has been moving along pretty well. I'm using Robocopy to go from an old PC onto the NAS box. It's seems to be slow, but I'm not sure where the bottleneck is. It's likely the PC, but network utilization (over GbE) is approx 20%. Not that great.

The machine is setup by default in a RAID 5 configuration. This one has (4) 1 TB drives and provides approx 2.6TB of usable data. that's not too bad, and is about what I was expecting. The drives are supposed to be hot swappable, but for me, that's not entirely necessary. I have yet to open it up, but will probably do so in the near future.

I've tested the FTP service and it works like expected.

I've tried to test NFS, but I'm having trouble. I'm getting RPC errors, which I'm not sure is from the Ubuntu box (client) or the NAS box. NFS isn't enabled on the ShareSpace by default, so you have to go into advanced and enable it. There's also a document that says Linux isn't currently supported. Although, they should just say NFS, because if you use the SMB protocol with Linux, it works just fine.

One nice thing that I wanted to point out is how simple it is to update the firmware. There's a button that you can press to check for new firmware versions. It will automatically download the firmware and then ask you if you want to apply it. It was absolutely flawless when I ran it.

There are other features that allow you to share files over the Internet. I'm not interested in doing that so I won't be using that feature.

You can create users/groups that have access to any of the shares. You can also add the ShareSpace to a Microsoft Active Directory. This is great for medium size offices where there's an AD in place. It just makes it easier to browse and should lock it down a little better. I don't have AD in place, so I wasn't able to use that. As far as the users go, I deleted the built-in guest account. I want the thing to be secure.

If you do end up buying this, just realize that it acts like a typical Windows machine sharing folders. You do NOT have to install any software to get it to work. The only reason you may want to do that is to find the IP address of the box when you first turn it on. The web-based GUI allows you to do everything you need to do. To connect to it from a Windows machine (or any SMB machine) just type \\IPAddress\ShareName (e.g. \\192.168.2.100\Public). To manage it, just point your web browser to the IP address. I've used IE and Firefox and they both work fine. No issues to report.

The box is still brand new to me so I'm still learning about it. I'll try and update this review when I play with some of the other features, or I get NFS to work. The one thing that I haven't configured yet, but plan on, is the alerting piece. You can get alerts via e-mail, which is really awesome. Especially if a drive fails and you're not checking the device regularly.

If you're in the market for a low cost NAS solution, then this is one device that will surely meet most of your needs. I would imagine that the software developers will likely add more features as it matures. Or someone will hach the machine and figure out how to run a web server on it. Regardless, I would highly recommend this to anyone that needs a lot of storage. So far, it's exactly what I was looking for.

Initially, I thought this was a great deal. 8TB of data storage for under $1000. I noticed it has a slow transfer rate (11 mb/sec), but it was easy to access from all my home computers. I was satisfied. As a precaution, I kept a backup of all data I put on the drive for the first month I had it. After that month passed, I stopped backing up on an additional drive and put my trust in this Western Digital. After 2 months, I had about 5TB of data on the drive and things were going well. I attempted to transfer some data from a PC on my network to the drive, as I had done many times before, but this time I got an error message saying the drive would not accept new data. I shut down the WD drive, thinking a reboot would solve the problem. When I turned it back on, the drive was no longer recognized on my network. I went through the set up again, and it recognized the WD drive. I went to open the "Public" folder where all my data was stored and I got a message that this folder could not be located. I tried it on all the computers on my network and received the same error from all of them. I contacted WD's tech support and was given some generalized answers that did nothing to solve the problem. They ended up suggesting that I test each drive individually on another PC. If they all pass, I put them back in the drive case and rebuild it, which would take an additional 18 hours and all data would be lost. I am now working on getting it into a place to save all the data they can off the drives before I get rid of the thing. It is going to cost me a lot of money to try to save this data, and of course, that is not covered by the warranty. Stay away from this product. Look around the net and you will see many other people who have had the same problems with this terrible device.

This product is a fine example of what happens when salespeople who do not understand technical requirements of customers and a hardrive company attempt to get in the NAS business. The whole point of a RAID array is to protect and provide a safehaven for your information. This device is enormously deficient in many areas, the main one being that your data is not safe if the main controller software fails to operate. I have had their drive for a little over a month now, and when a device fails completely in this short of time, it is a real warning sign that it is poorly designed and thus undependable. After speaking to a call center in India and waiting on hold for 10 minutes, I was finally transferred back to a call center back in the states somewhere. I was then put on hold for an additional 30 minutes, and then was connected to a technician. After about 5 minutes of working with him, he proceeded to explain to me that I was in need of returning the device to my retailer, and unless I took it to one of their data recovery specialists, it would be lost. In summary, from my humble opinion, I cannot depend on western digital and their products. I will go elsewhere and be sure to not recommend their product, as they do not wish to take care of their customers needs.

This is a very good solid NAS (Network Attached Storage)
I will address the negatives as most are wrong.

Lack of Documentation? Is wrong. There is a 100 page manual on the CD and there is exceptional contextual help when you connect to the NAS with a web browser.

Poor performance? Is wrong. This is a NAS device not an internal drive. For me it writes at about 100 mbs and reads at about 230 mbs. It is common knowledge that to get the protection of RAID 5 you must give up some write performance.

You can see each others files? This is wrong. If you use a web browser to the NAS and create users you can then map drives as that user. Each user has there own file space and you can even limit their disk quota.

The backup software is poor? This is wrong. I am using it for 300 GB backups and I can select what files or drives I want. The really cool thing is that once your first backup is done it only backs up the files AS YOU SAVE THEM so you NEVER have to do a long backup again. Also you can get as many copies of a file you want so if you delete or mangle a file you can retrieve whatever version you like. Sorry kids, but this feature totally ROCKS!

Web interface is slow? Not on my system.

Too slow for a video server? This is wrong. Max video (uncompressed Blue Ray) is 25 mbs. The one person is trying to use his RAID 5 backup drive for video editing? Usually you use RAID 1 for that. And I have never heard of anyone using 'Network' attached storage for editing, only directly connect drives. Even a full Gigabit network is too slow for that.

All that said, it is usefull to have knowledge of either Windows file share using the 'connect as' feature or knowledge of Linux if you want to connect a Mac or do ftp backups. This isn't a toy. :-)

I acquired this drive primarily as a media archive solution, ideally to integrate with Windows Home Server and Media Center. Main desires:

1. Easy to set up
2. Good performance over 100BaseT and Gigabit connections
3. Compact and quiet

Setup was fairly straight forward. I got the device recognized by my main machine (WinXP box) within 5 minutes of connecting to my network. Setting it up with a Static IP proved to be a non issue as well. Only thing I wish this had was a USB connector to directly connect to a machine, to make the initial data migration quicker. It does have USB ports, but these are used to add stoarge to the device. After a couple of days of use, only quirky thing is having to always specify credentials to access a share after a PC reboot, but I think that's a security feature.

Performance I think is about average. I left the configuration as RAID 5. Over Gigabit ethernet, performance was noticeably better than over 100BaseT connections. I don't have any numbers, but you will definitely notice a difference in file copying with a Gigabit Ethernet based network. One thing I did find to be a litle sluggish was the performance of the web based interface. It seems like under any kind of server load, the pages for administration take 5-6 seconds to load at a minimum. Sometimes it feels like the server has hung, even though it never actually has done this to me.

As far as form factor goes, it definitely is small, quiet, and unobtrusive. The AC adapter is not a wallwart type unit, but a two piece setup, with an ungrounded plug. I have it stacked on top of a Shuttle SFF PC and the width of the unit is nearly exactly the same as the PC case. I could see throwing this into a closet or the garage and not worrying about it.

So far, no problems with Media Center recordings and recording directly to the volume (this is with an HD stream too). Haven't tried to see if WHS can detect this device and aggregate it with other existing volumes, but I'm not sure this will work without reformatting. Blah. I think WHS requires dries to be physically connected to the WHS server machine.

Did not install the WD backup program (which is made my Memeo and comes with 3 licenses... nice touch).

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.