WD My Cloud DL4100 Business NAS Review

By Nathan Kirsch

WD My Cloud DL4100 Performance Benchmarks

WD My Cloud DL4100 Small Office NAS

To check the performance of the WD My Cloud DL4100 8TB we ran run a number of single computer benchmarks to access the NAS to look at how the NAS performs from a single-client perspective.
The first test we’ll be running is CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 x64 with the default settings. This is a quick and easy storage drive benchmark utility that shows the peak sequential and random read/write speeds.

nas-cdm

The WD My Cloud DL4100 8TB Business NAS topped out at 104.2 MB/s read and 93.8 MB/s write in the sequential file test in CDM.

nas-atto

Next we used the ATTO benchmark utility and it found that we were getting 119MB/s read speeds and 98MB/s write speeds with our 2 x 4TB WD RED RAID 1 array in the WD My Cloud DL4100. These are very impressive speeds for any NAS with Gigabit LAN as 1 Gigabit per second is equal to 125MB/s as the theoretical maximum. By they time you take into account overheads and all that the 119MB/s is about as high as you’ll see on a Gigabit network. You can get a bit more by enabling jumbo frame support, but this is about it.

robocopy

Dragging files between folders with Windows Explorer is fine for some tasks, but when it comes to heavy-duty file management you can do better with something called Robocopy. Robocopy (the name is short for Robust File Copy) was introduced with the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit and is included in all editions of Windows since. We used Robocopy to move a 1GB folder full of images from our desktop PC over to the WD My Cloud DL4100 8TB Business NAS and found we had 96.5 MB/s read speeds and 75.8 MB/s write speeds.

naspt

The last benchmark test that we ran on the DL4100 was the Intel NAS Performance Toolkit (NASPT), which is a pretty old benchmark that hasn’t been updated in over half a decade. It’s also becoming extremely tough to run as it was built to work on Windows XP on a system that has at most 2GB of memory in order to have accurate test results. The test is still arguably a good NAS performance test of day-to-day workloads though and people still like to see it. As you can see we topped out at 114.3 MB/s in the 4x HD video playback test and the slowest performance was seen in the content creation test where we hit 13.4 MB/s. These are all respectable scores from the DL4100!