Western Digital Make Backup Devices? Sep14

Western Digital Make Backup Devices?

Western Digital (WD) is well known for it’s hard drives. They’re one of the few remaining manufacturers and have a reasonable reputation in this market. They’ve also made great media players which again have a good reputation of ‘just working’. Being a storage company though, it makes sense that they make backup devices too, namely the Arkeia range of WD products. I’ve had a chance to check out the WD Arkeia DA2300 that they sent out to me, and it’s turning out to be a decent piece of kit. Hardware: The Box Physically, the WD Arkeia DA2300 is a modern and functional looking cube (almost a cube at least, it’s slightly longer). It measures roughly 16cm H  x 21 W x 22cm L which seems pretty small for what it’s packing. The LCD screen shows the device name and IP address, and below it has a lockable front door which conceals the four hot swappable drive bays. One of the nice things about this is that there’s no screws required which some other 4 bay devices have, you just slide in a raw SATA drive. Looking at the back of the device, there’s an abundance of ports. 6 USB ports, with 4 being USB3 should cover any USB connectivity requirements. Below the USB ports are two gigabit NICs and a 3rd port which you can ignore… it’s not functional, and doesn’t appear in any spec sheets. There’s also a single VGA port, and two power holes. Two power packs are provided with the unit, so if one either fails or accidentally gets unplugged, the device itself continues to stay up. As you can see from the photo, I just plugged one in and it worked perfectly fine: Specifications: What’s Inside? Firstly, there’s two options depending on your requirements. You...