WD My Cloud DL4100 Business NAS Review

By Nathan Kirsch

WD My Cloud DL4100 USB 3.0 Benchmarks

Inateck FD1006C w/ Corsair Neutron XT

To try out the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 ports we used the Corsair Neutron XT 240GB SSD in an Inateck FD1006C USB 3.0 docking station, which is the fastest USB 3.0 drive housing that we have.

usb3-cdm

We tested the front SuperSpeed USB 3.0 port and found that we needed external power for the Inateck FD1006C external USB 3.0 housing to operate as the power from the USB 3.0 port was not sufficient for our setup. Once we had the housing plugged into the wall we were getting 103.6 MB/s read and 110.7 MB/s write speeds with our drive plugged into the USB 3.0 port. WD says the front port can provide 1.1 Amps of power, but that clearly wasn’t enough to power our 3.5-inch enclosure with an SSD.

atto-usb3

ATTO showed that the USB 3.0 attached SSD peaked at 118.8 MB/s read and 117.5 MB/s write speeds on the WD My Cloud DL4100. Since both the RAID 1 array and our USB 3.0 devices top out at ~118 MB/s it looks the WD My Cloud DL4100 is clearly Gigabit network limited, although this should be plenty of bandwidth for a multi-user and multi-application work environment in 2015.