 |   Format : CD Publisher : Western Digital Company : Western Digital List Price: Our Price: Too low to display Used Price : $411.62 |
Features
- Sharespace network storage
- NAS 4TB 4BAY raid
Product Description
Centralized storage with plenty of capacity to go around.Plug this high-speed Gigabit Ethernet storage system into your small office or home network for centralized storage with plenty of capacity to go around.
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 and multimedia files on a small office or home network.
Big capacity, small footprint - Offered in 2, 4 and 8 TB capacities, this small-footprint four-bay system takes up very little space and provides plenty of storage to go around.
RAID capability - Offers multiple RAID configurations for data protection and speed -- RAID 0 (Striped), RAID 1 (Mirrored) and RAID 5. The RAID 5 mode, only available on the fully-populated 4-drive system, is the recommended mode to achieve both high-performance and data protection through redundancy.
The 4 and 8 TB WD ShareSpace systems are shipped in RAID 5 mode for maximum reliability.
The 2 TB WD ShareSpace system is shipped in Spanning Mode for maximum capacity and the flexibility to add additional drives without reformatting the system.
High-speed access, Ethernet connectivity - Provides data transfer rates up to 1000 Mbit/s when used in a GigE network.
Easy setup and discovery - An intuitive set-up wizard and easy-to-use discovery tool makes installation a snap.
E-mail alert system - Monitors drive and system health and sends you an e-mail if a problem is detected.
Stream digital media anywhere in your home - Built-in media server for streaming music, photos and movies to any DLNA certified multimedia device such as Playstation® 3, Xbox 360®, wireless digital picture frames, and connected audio receivers. DLNA 1.5 & UPnP certified.
iTunes server support - Centralize your music collection and st
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Customer reviews
Excellent SOHO NAS Device 
by .. Jeff ten Bosch (New Jersey)
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.
Negative Reviews Are Not Right by .. Gordon B. West ()
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. :-)
Dont listen to the negatives....This NAS rocks! by .. Jason A. Dekeyser (Detroit, MI USA)
I cant believe all of the negative reviews on this 4TB Sharespace. Makes me wonder what the technical level is of all the people leaving bad reviews. Its easy to get frustrated over something that you just dont understand. I have a feeling the people leaving the nasty reviews are doing everything from the GUI, which is not necessary. If you know how to map a network drive and understand NTFS permissions you will not have a problem with this. Been running solid for over 6 months for me and I never even had to reboot the thing. RAID 5 is running strong. I have a 1TB WD10EADS as a hot spare in case a drive goes bad. I have been streaming movies and music downstairs to my big screen TV. The best purchase I have made in years! Sit back and relax knowing if a drive fails you just have to throw another one in and let the Sharespace rebuild the RAID 5 array. I LOVE THIS THING AND WOULD RECOMMEND!
Sweet by .. M&M (Go New Jersey)
Needed more space for pictures and family videos. This thing works as advertised. Plugged it into power and network. Software that came with it works very nicely. Surely, not inexpensive, but if this size of storage is what you need, then this product will not disappoint.
How much are your baby's pictures worth? by .. Just Anonymous (Georgia, USA)
A couple of months ago the primary hard drive on my home workstation suffered a very bad crash. I wound up having to get a Sabrent USB-DSC5 Serial ATA or IDE 2.5-/3.5-Inch to USB 2.0 Cable Converter Adapter with Power Supply to triage that old hard drive and salvage some of my data out from it. However, even with tools and a pretty good hardware/software background I wound up losing some data but fortunately, I was able to recover the vast majority of the data from the drive -- which included 3 years worth of baby pictures (that would've been the worst loss) but I did lose some tax records, quicken backups, etc. The data I managed to recover wound up spread across 3 portable drives and two laptops because I didn't have an empty drive of that size.
That was jus a horrible experience and it left me very worried: single hard drives fail, even backup hard drives fail.
That led me to this little device. It's really 4 hard drives working in an array (called a RAID array) that act as one single volume (drive). The data goes into this device and is redundantly spread out among 4 drives. If one hard drive in this device fails, pull it out, slap a blank one in its place and the array rebuilds itself and you lose no data --- it works.
This is the same technology that is used by corporations to back up their data.
A few things to note, this is not a 4TB box. It comes with 4TB worth of drives but in order to get data redundancy you'll likely have to use RAID 1 or RAID 5 (it comes preconfigured for RAID 5). This means that you lose about 1/4 of your storage right off the bat to the redundancy. Out of the box, this thing showed 2.68TB of redudandant storage available (about what I expected). You can certainly use it as 4TB plain drive but you won't get any redundancy: I highly recommend using RAID 5 or another redundant mode.
In any case, setup was a pinch. I plugged this thing into the wall and plugged it's ethernet connection into my network switch which is plugged into my wireless router and all my laptops around the house instantly saw it.
I installed the drivers from the included CD on my laptops (Windows 7 and Windows Vista) and very qickly I had my H: (Home drive) up and running. I'm migrating and reconsolidating my data back to my new NAS (network attached storage) as I type this.
PROS:
- very small (it's a little cube about 9x9x9
- very easy to install
- you don't need to have a specific computer turned on (it's stand alone)
- plugs directly into the network and is seen by all computers
- it's not wireless (so it's more secure, security is handled by my home's wireless router which makes it wireless to me)
- comes with automatic backup software so you can backup your computers to it automatically.
- Big (4terabytes)
- WD offers data backup services to offsite, which means you can even get that level of redundancy.
CONS:
- I've heard that this is not a "true" hardware RAID but rather a "software" RAID but this isn't a datacenter, it's for my home and all I want is for my data to be redundantly safe.
A few other things:
- if you're a digital photographer, you know that pictures are big (since getting a DSLR, my picture collection is upwards of 100GB and growing, so definitely if you're a digital photographer, you need someplace safe to store those giant picture collections).
- if you have an iTunes subscription, this thing has a build in iTunes and Media Server built in (and music and video-movie collections are also gigantic and you don't want to lose them.
- increasingly the need for data, video, image storage in a regular home is increasing exponentially and devices like this are becoming not just needed but indispensable
I think in the years to come with movies, pictures, and music taking up even larger amounts of space, the need to store these things securely is going to become paramount and devices like this are going to become a commonplace in the home.