DX4000 Drives no longer available

Legacy Products WD Sentinel
1

I was in the process of purchasing a DX4000 and when I attempted to purchase a backup drive, everyone including Western Digital Store are either out of stock and/or show them discontinued.

Can someone update me as to why the shortage of this drive?  Or is Western Digital coming out with a new NAS system?

2

Which drive are you trying to get?

3

The drive listed in the accessory area of the WD Store.  It is listed in the 2TB expansion kit.  Every reseller I have looked at shows it either out of stock or discontinued.  Even your own WD Store lists it as out of stock.

4

I currently put out an inquiry as to the status of the WDBNSH0020HNC-NASN 2TB HDD and will let you know when I get a response.

5

I have just received a response to my inquiry, and they reported that there is a shortage and they are trying to get stock.  I was told that I could point you to some other retailers that say they have them in stock.

1)  cdw.com (their website shows available)

2)  bhpphotovideo.com (also shows available)

I hope this helps

6

Thanks for your quick response… 

I will order the DX4000 today.  I did not want to order an obsolete system that was in the process of being replaced with a newer system.  With the drives being our of stock in so many places, including your own store, I was concerned that they would not be available as replacements.

7

Actually neither cdw nor does bhphotovideo have the drives.  There is no place in the entire country that offer this drive and many retailers say that it is either “discontinued” or “deactivated”.  I’m wodering if there were so many returns that WD ran through their stock prematurely.

The 3TB version is available but then we are just wasting an extra $100 for 1TB of capacity that can’t be used in a raid 5 configuration. 

It would be nice if we could get additional information on the future availablility or a good trade up program. If the 2TB drive is indeed discontinued, I’d gladly trade in my existing good two 2TB drives and 2x$100 for two 3TB drives so I can purchase an additional 3TB drive and upgrade to raid 5.

Or WD should at least make DX4000 drivers available for other model number 2TB drives.

8

I was able to source 3TB and 4TB drives from eBay fairly inexpensively; the 4TB Hitachi drives run around $200-225. Currently, the 3TB drives are few in number and high in price, but I was able to get mine for $115.

One thing I haven’t tried yet is to see if the RAID array will automatically upgrade the storage limit when all of the drives have been upgraded. My Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440 will do that. Replace each drive with a larger size and when all are replaced the RAID5 array will embiggen itself.

The drives appear to be limited by the whitelist.xml file located on the thumbdrive image, and transferred to the System partition. Modifying that may allow the use of other drives. I haven’t tried that yet, either.