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NETGEAR ReadyNAS RN516 Reviewed

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Razor512

Very Senior Member
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-reviews/32203-netgear-readynas-rn516-reviewed

In the review of the ReadyNAS RN516, the performance is really good, but why does it have such a high cost?

A desktop PC build of similar specs would cost about $400 (not including the LCD display and capacitive buttons) but on amazon, it cost over $1100.

What I would like to know is how would such a system compare to a user building a similarly spec system, or using the money saved to add a few raid cards and extra storage.

While a user may not get 100% of the same set of features, they will end up with a system that can serve many purposes.

Outside of enterprises who have fewer issues with overpriced items, for a home user I find it difficult to justify NAS pricing especially if you look at the performance charts and at their prices and compare it to modern low cost systems which can easily max out a gigabit connection for far less money.

What am I missing that justifies the high cost of this NAS and most NAS devices in general (especially some of the clearly slow ones but still cost a lot)
 
this thing is not designed for homeusers. thats what the 100 and 300 series are for (which are way cheaper). this thing is a performance-monster built for demanding business applications.

and the price isnt as high if you compare it to similar builds from other nas vendors such as qnap or synology or thecus.
 
The two 516 units I've used both shipped with the new style tool-less drive tray (well you still need tools if you want to install a 2.5" drive) so maybe getting an older drive tray was just an anomaly with your review unit. After all only the new drive tray is suitable for installing 2.5" drives that are on the compatibility list and NetGear's video showing off the 516 shows the new style drive tray as does the instructions in the hardware manual.

As for 10G on the 516, you may be pleased to note that the product manager at NetGear has indicated that this optional extra will be available for purchase in the near term: http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=402335#p402335 (it is worth noting that the new 12-bay rackmount device the 4220 has 10G so there is already some support in the OS for 10G).

Sequential reads/writes of a file created from /dev/zero I found to be around 400 MB/s. Over a 10 gigabit connection one would expect the transfer to be slower due to network overheads, possible bottlenecks in the client machine, and the fact that real world files wouldn't be that sequential.

This was with 6x2TB SeaGate Enterprise drives installed. Obviously if SSDs were used performance would be better still.
 
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Just not crazy with Netgear's new OS6. Doesn't provide user quotas and so far limited add-ons. Plus external drive backups keep previous files on an incremental backup. And Synology's new DSM 4.3 is looking like a nightmare.
 
The new OS uses BTRFS which is a filesystem that is under heavy development. It looks like the filesystem supports quotas now and that there have been some improvements in this regard in recent vanilla kernels, so hopefully this can be backported at some point.

New add-ons are being made available over time. If there are add-ons that aren't available which you especially want you can make a request on the forum and perhaps even contact one of the developers super-poussin and WhoCares? directly. Or if you have the skills perhaps build an add-on yourself. If you don't have a spare system for development you could use the VM: http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=35

As for external drive backups if you backup to the external drive using Rsync you could configure the job to remove files that were deleted on the source on the backup destination. This is the same work around that has been used very successfully with the old OS.
 
Just not crazy with Netgear's new OS6. Doesn't provide user quotas and so far limited add-ons. Plus external drive backups keep previous files on an incremental backup. And Synology's new DSM 4.3 is looking like a nightmare.

Anything out there you feel positive about?
Especially based on 1st hand experience.
 
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well, hundreds of thousands use and like Synology and QNAP. Mostly not home/consumers who are the most common users of this forum.

I've had mine for a long time and it has been problem free.
 
The new OS uses BTRFS which is a filesystem that is under heavy development. It looks like the filesystem supports quotas now and that there have been some improvements in this regard in recent vanilla kernels, so hopefully this can be backported at some point.

New add-ons are being made available over time. If there are add-ons that aren't available which you especially want you can make a request on the forum and perhaps even contact one of the developers super-poussin and WhoCares? directly. Or if you have the skills perhaps build an add-on yourself. If you don't have a spare system for development you could use the VM: http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=35

As for external drive backups if you backup to the external drive using Rsync you could configure the job to remove files that were deleted on the source on the backup destination. This is the same work around that has been used very successfully with the old OS.

I sure hope Netgear implements quotas as I don't want users to blow away all the available storage space. As far as rsync, someone in the forums said the same thing about differential backups. However, the USB or external drive has to be setup for Rsync protocol as well as the source. Then the remote device has to be set to the IP address of the NAS. Since I haven't decided on what NAS to get I have not tried this.
 
In what way (genuinely interested, not challenging)?

Well I was only giving my opinion of what the Synology forums seem to be saying. PhotoStation, VideoStation, etc. One thing that Synology did not state was VideoStation dropped DTS audio in 4.3
 
However, the USB or external drive has to be setup for Rsync protocol as well as the source.
Only one share should need to be setup for Rsync. Either the share on the NAS or the USB disk, not both. So you could either enable Rsync for the share on the NAS and specify the source as a remote rsync server with the I.P. address of the NAS and the path the sharename and the backup destination the local USB disk. Or enable Rsync for the USB disk and specify the local share as the source, and the I.P. address of the NAS as the destination with something like "USB_HDD_1/foldername" (no quotes) as the path.
 
In what way (genuinely interested, not challenging)?

FWIW I participated in the beta (and all the betas they have had for DSM in the last 2 years) and have the current release of DSM 4.3 and am not experiencing problems, let alone nightmares.

If anything I find Synology to be pretty responsive in fixing bugs, expanding with new features, and still keeping platform stable. Even look at the mobile companion app support for their machines and you'll see the mobile apps (Android, iOS, and even Windows Phone) get revved on a not infrequent basis to fix bugs and stuff.

Not saying they are without fault, and maybe some people are having some problems w/ 4.3, but I don't even participate in any Synology forums, it does what I need it to do out of the box.

The one thing I did submit feedback on was Amazon Glacier backup new package was glitchy and conked out on me (after uploading about 300gb over a couple days). It is a brand new feature, I had never even used Glacier before (I backup my Synology to external rotated off-site drives) but it looked interesting so I tried it.

Well I was only giving my opinion of what the Synology forums seem to be saying. PhotoStation, VideoStation, etc. One thing that Synology did not state was VideoStation dropped DTS audio in 4.3

Only on some kinds of files, like MKV, that aren't encoded with AC3, which doesn't affect me because the times I watch MKVs is usually on my MacBook, downconverting to stereo is fine. I've ripped most important stuff (for my collection) in .mp4 h264 AC3 for years to make it itunes/AppleTV/iOS friendly, so I am yet to feel the sting of this one.

However, if I have a nightmare tonight, I'm holding you personally responsible. ;)
 
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