WD My Cloud DL4100 Business NAS Review

By Nathan Kirsch March 3, 2015

Inside The WD My Cloud DL4100

Since the WD My Cloud DL4100 was designed to have expandable memory we wanted to take the My Cloud DL4100 apart and see what was going on inside.

With the black metal cover removed we were able to take a look inside the WD My Cloud DL4100. The layout is very simple with motherboard on the side of the NAS with the drives located in other portion of the housing. Only two wires are connected to the motherboard; the front LCD panel and the power for the rear case fan.

One of the big selling points of the WD My Cloud Business Series versus the WD My Cloud Expert Series is that it has expandable memory. You can add an additional 4GB DDR3 1600MHz notebook memory module to the DL4100 by just removing the side panel and inserting a module into the slot. We tried out a Kingston HyperX Impact Black Series 1600MHz 4GB DDR3L memory module that runs $36.99 shipped and it worked without any issues.

With the motherboard removed you can see what appears to be a PCIe slot that connects the daughter board for the four SATA III hard drives to the mainboard. The white 4-pin fan header for the one 80mm fan that cools the entire NAS server can be seen along the lower left edge of the board.

Here is a look at the other side of the mainboard used in the DL4100.

This small black heatsink sits over the Intel Atom C2338 dual-core processor (Codenamed Rangeley) that runs at 1.7GHz with a TDP rating of just 7 Watts. This 22nm processor has a maximum turbo frequency of 2 GHz thanks to Intel Turbo Boost 2.0 technology and features AES New Instructions. This processor doesn’t need a heatsink with a fan on it for proper cooling, so WD was able to get away with a passive CPU cooler.

WD placed a single Micron 2GB SLC NAND Flash memory chip on the board to handle the operating system. The part number is 29F4G08ABAEA.

The WD My Cloud DL4100 has 2GB of DDR3 1600MHz memory that are marked with FBGa code D9PSH. The full part number on these IC is MT41K256M8DA-125:K and they 2Gb density FBGA packaged ICs that operate at 1.35V.

The WD My Cloud DL4100 features a STMicroelectronics STM32 32-bit ARM Cortex MCU. The full part number on this MCU is STM32F030 and it can run at speeds of up to 48MHz. WD said that this ARM chip is used for power management as well as controlling the display.

A pair of Marvell Alaska 88E1512 Gigabyte Ethernet (GbE) single port controllers handle the networking duties. These are 40nm PHYs and incorporate Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) features, based on IEEE 802.3az, for significant power savings during idle periods

Next up we have a Silicon Motion SM3252Q dual-channel USB 3.0 Flash drive controller.

WD went with an ON Semiconductor NCP81109C VCore controller to handle the PWM solution for the Intel Atom C2338 processor.

Lastly, we have the Winbond 25Q64FVIG 64MBit SPI Flash chip that holds the BIOS of the WD My Cloud DL4100.

Now that we know what the WD My Cloud DL4100 is and what is inside of it, we can move along and setup the NAS server!