Western digital wd sentinel dx4000 problems

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I found a couple of second hand units on Ebay and saved them for later. While waiting for the USB adapter to arrive I researched other options and found that the DX4000 drives can be swapped into another unit without them being wiped. The USB key only wipes the OS drive, so if it didn't work out, I'd still have other options. In the mean time I prepared a recovery USB key.

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I decided to bite the bullet, ordered a USB network adapter that which Windows support by default:

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I had previously found the blog series on upgrading the Sentinel DX4000 to Windows 2012 and found it was updated with a download link for a Windows 2016 image.

I contacted a data recovery company and they offered a data extraction for $900, quite a lot of money for 1 month worth of photographs. I contacted Western Digital, but they don't provide any warranty on the device and don't ship replacement parts (even if you want to pay for them).

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While I didn't care about a lot of the data on the server, the photo archive is important. I do take regular backups to a set of external drives, but I hadn't taken one with all the latest bits.

#Western digital wd sentinel dx4000 problems drivers

The server runs Windows 2008r2, and doesn't ship with a lot of network drivers built-in and I hadn't installed any myself, so plugging in a USB network adapter didn't work :(.

This wouldn't have been a problem if the machine had a video port, but because it's a headless server, once you lose network access you're in big trouble. When it happens the lights on the network ports won't blink and the LCD display shows: Network Disconnected Of course I only found out about this issue after I lost access to the server. It turns out that the Western Digital Sentinel DX4000 has a common hardware failure: The network ports completely stop working. It has served me well for the last 5 years, but it disappeared from my network from one day to the other. It's a Network Attached Storage device that runs Windows Server. A couple of years ago I bought a Western Digital Sentinel DX4000 server.

Follow Lucas on Twitter at or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed. Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. 'Between the flooding in Thailand and the Hitachi merger and the products we're launching, we have a lot of balls in the air.' 'We do have a road map we're trying to finalize,' he said. WD plans to continue with a series of products over the next 12 to 18 months, according to Gallivan. The array offers built-in remote web access to data along with collaboration with remote employees, or third party clients and vendors who are given administrative authorization. And it allows you to do a bare metal restore of a laptop or desktop from the device locally, Gallivan said. The DX4000 does daily image-based backup of devices. In RAID 5 mode, the array supports up to 85MB/sec data transfer rates. In a two-drive configuration, the RAID level automatically elevates to 5 when a third disk is added, Gallivan said. The DX4000 comes preconfigured as RAID 1 for systems with only two disks (4TB) and RAID 5 for systems with four disks (8TB). You select which files you want protected, how much data to move offsite, or just auto select folders,' said Tom Gallivan, vice president of WD's SMB storage solutions group. 'It'll allow people to have an offsite copy of data. For instance, WD has partnered with third party cloud storage providers to offer a disaster recovery service, where data is replicated from the DX4000 array to an offsite facility. Windows Storage Server 2008 also supports plug-ins for cloud services.