TweakTown have a NAS HDD showdown between the WD Red vs the Seagate NAS.
A very thorough 6 page review can be found here, but in conclusion they are both as good as each other.
The Sentinel DS5100/DS6100 are 2 new offerings from WD.
Similar too the WD Sentinel DX4000 these 2 new offerings come with Windows Server
2012 R2 Essentials instead of Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials. A Intel Xeon processor with RAID JBOD, 0, 1, 5 or 10.
The WD Sentinel DS5100 is available in 4TB ($2,560) and 8TB ($3,200) configurations, both with 8 GB of ECC RAM. Mean while the WD Sentinel DS6100 is available in 8TB ($3,440),
12TB ($3,960) and 16TB ($4,560) configurations, all with 16GB of ECC RAM.
The DS5100 also includes a 2.5" boot drive and the DS6100 has 2 2.5" boot drives configures as mirrored, RAID-1.
More information is available from WD, and a PDF data sheet is also available.
The WD Sentinel DS 6100 is an update to the DX4000 but this one is using Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials.
A nice unit, although pricey!
A 2 page review can be found at The Register.
Update Rollup 3 for Server Essentials 2012 has been released.
UR 3 includes new solutions to skip DNS auto-detect and configuration on the client, contains new Best Practice Analyzer (BPA) rules and introduces a new Branding name for the Windows Azure Backup integration add-in.
The following 12 issues are resolved with this release:
UR3 is available from Windows Update. More details are available from here.
A few people have asked me where they can download the Windows Server Essentials Connector for Windows Server 2012 R2.
This is an easy one. Just head on over here to the Microsoft Download Center where you will find the download.
If you running Windows Server 2012 R2 RTM with the Essentials role added, or are running Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials RTM you may experience an error when trying to run http://server/connect on each workstation.
This error is due to an HTTP 404 error and a fix is available from Microsoft.
More information on why this occurs and how to fix it can be found at Lyle Epstein’s Systems Engineer Blog.
TechRepublic list their 10 cool features in Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials:
For a more in depth look at these features, you can check out their article here.
The The Windows Server Essentials and Small Business Server Blog has a nice article on virtualizing Windows Server Essentials:
Windows Server Essentials enjoys all the same capabilities and benefits of virtualization as the Standard and Datacenter editions of Windows Server. In addition, there are some capabilities that are specific to Windows Server Essentials
You can find their article here.
Another update for StableBit DrivePool , this time for users of Windows Server 2012 Essentials and Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials.
Version 2.0.0.240 Release Final has the following change:
This release can be downloaded from here.
More details on this release can be found in the following blog post.
StableBit DrivePool for WHS2011 users has been updated to version 1.3.5.7572 with miscellaneous fixes.
Here’s the change log:
This release can be downloaded from here.
