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RAID Mode Comparison

Advantages of RAID
There are three reasons you might want a RAID system of drives.

1. You need tons of storage space and you need it to be fast. (RAID 0)
2. You want to instantaneously and automatically backup your data. (RAID 1)
3. You want both. (RAID 5)

Which RAID mode should I use?

1. Speed (RAID 0)

Set in high-performance mode (also called striped mode or RAID 0) the storage system gives you the power you need when you're:

• Designing huge graphics and you need a lightning-fast Photoshop scratch space.
• Recording large DV files while maintaining clean audio performance.
• Editing DV or HD video and you want a smooth work flow with no dropped frames.
• Rendering complex 3D objects or special effects.
• Performing disk-intensive database operations.
• Driven to be the first geek on your block with a computer so fast it blows your socks off.

Why is RAID 0 so fast? It’s a bit complicated, but suffice it to say that two or more heads, or in this case, drives, are better than one. Picture multiple hoses filling a bucket at the same time or several men bailing a boat and you can understand why two drives striped are faster than one. Data is saved (striped) across both drives and accessed in parallel by all the drives so you get higher data transfer rates on large data accesses and higher input/output rates on small data accesses.

2. Data protection (RAID 1)

Set the system to data protection mode (also known as mirrored mode or RAID 1) and the capacity is divided in half. Half of the capacity is used to store your data and half is used for a duplicate copy.

Why do I want that kind of redundancy? It’s your data, your family pictures, your movie of baby’s first steps, your first novel. Is it important? You decide. If it is, then RAID mirroring is for you.

3. Data protection and speed (RAID 5)

In systems with three or more drives, (like our 4 TB WD ShareSpace Network Storage System) we recommend that you set the system to RAID 5. This gives you the best of both worlds: fast performance by striping data across all drives; data protection by dedicating a quarter of each drive to fault tolerance leaving three quarters of the system capacity is available for data storage.

Decent RAID/NAS With A Few Drawbacks
(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.

Excellent SOHO NAS Device
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.

WD Time Bomb
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.