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Re: RN104 Long in The Tooth What Would You Recommend Upgrading to?
Stephen,
I just wanted to finish this thread by thanking you once again for your excellent help and to also give some stats on what has transpired with my backup to an external drive. I had never used the USB 3.0 port on the back of this RN104 unit until now. After receiving the Sabrent powered, USB3.0, flip top enclosure and inserting the 20tb WD Red Pro drive and connecting to this port, all went well. I was able to create a backup job for everything in the NAS. A total of 10tb. I started on Feb. 1, 2024 @4:26 PM and the log shows it completed on Feb. 4, 2024 @5:22 AM. Calculating the numbers gives me around 45Mbs transfer rate, which is what I expected. So, now it's off to the races and to upgrade the 4X4tb WD Red Pro drives in the NAS to 4X8tb WD Red Pro drives to increase my space. I will mark this as solved now.
Since Netgear is no longer in the business of selling the Home Nas devices, what to upgrade to?
I have this legacy RN104 populated with 4x4tb WD Red drives that have performed well.
But, now I want to increase my storage. I was about to order 4 8tb WD Red Plus drives but the fear
of failing hardware haunts me now. Any recommendations? I have had my eye on a Synology 1522+.
FWIW, I am planning to continue to use my ReadyNAS for the foreseeable future. I only use them for storage, there are no apps on them and they are not opened up to the internet.
That said, if I were looking for for a NAS now, I'd investigate
Asustor
QNAP
Synology
(alphabetical order).
I'd also look at getting a USB-C or perhaps a thunderbolt enclosure, and connect that to a PC. QNAP makes some similar enclosures that use SFF-8088 and have a PCIe card to connect to a PC. That is faster than USB-C.
Re: RN104 Long in The Tooth What Would You Recommend Upgrading to?
Stephen, would you mind adding a bit as to why those models in that order?
I also plan on using this RN104 until it just breaks. But, I also would like a newer system that I can backup the RN104 to like as redundant backup.
I have one newer computer that uses the USB-C connection and I'm hoping for a faster data transfer than the old 35-95mbs I have been getting. Not positive as to where the bottleneck is, only assuming here.
Stephen, would you mind adding a bit as to why those models in that order?
The order was just alphabetical, and is where I'd start looking. I'm not saying I'd end up with one of those models. All three of those vendors have pretty good reviews.
The fourth idea (a USB enclosure) is something I'm just thinking about - and is shifting away from a NAS altogether. In some ways it is continuing down a path I am already on. I only use my NAS for storage (both backup and primary storage), and have a Windows PC I use as an application server (with NAS shares mapped as drive letters).
Given the size of modern disks, I don't really need RAID. Connecting an enclosure directly to an application server gives the server a 10 gb/s connection to the storage (USB-C 3.2 Gen 2), and I can just create network shares for other devices on the PC. This is simpler than what I'm doing now, and these enclosures are less expensive than NAS.
I'm hoping for a faster data transfer than the old 35-95mbs I have been getting.
Do you mean megabits or megabytes?
An RN100 series can provide around 70 MB/s of large file throughput over gigabit ethernet. It's limited by its modest CPU and small amount of memory (512 MB). The system was launched 10 years ago, so a new entry-level NAS would give better performance.
But gigabit ethernet is limited to ~100 MB/s throughput, so if you want more than that you need to get multigig ethernet.
Re: RN104 Long in The Tooth What Would You Recommend Upgrading to?
I meant MB/s. I like your idea of using individual external drives now as you say they are very inexpensive.
I believe my next step would be to invest in a WD 16tb Elements Desktop drive I'm seeing on Amazon for $260 and use that to first, backup what I currently have on the NAS. I've never used the USB port on this RN104 and am not sure if that would work to just plug in this drive and then proceed to drag and drop volumes over to it. Can you give me some pointers on this or how best to go about it? Would it be best to just plug the WD Elements drive into my USB on my computer and drag and drop from finder windows? I am currently at Windows 10.
Once I am able to complete that task I would like to upgrade the current 4 x 4tb drives in this RN104 to 4 X 8tb and see how that goes. Then, possibly buy another external drive to use as a backup for the NAS, having this 16tb Elements in safe keeping for awhile until I'm sure the upgraded NAS and external backup is running smoothly.
What do you recommend for the hard drive to use as external backup? I'm thinking I need to look at some better option like a separate drive and case.
I believe my next step would be to invest in a WD 16tb Elements Desktop drive I'm seeing on Amazon for $260 and use that to first, backup what I currently have on the NAS. I've never used the USB port on this RN104 and am not sure if that would work to just plug in this drive and then proceed to drag and drop volumes over to it. Can you give me some pointers on this or how best to go about it?
Doing drag and drop from the PC isn't the best approach when the USB drive is connected to the NAS. Even though the files aren't being copied to the PC, the data is still transfered twice over the network (NAS->PC and then PC->NAS).
You definitely should have a backup plan in place for the NAS, as RAID isn't enough to keep your data safe. Doing that before upgrading the drives is the right approach, since if something goes wrong you won't lose any data.
Lots of folks do use external drives for backup, but I actually have more than one NAS, so I personally am using NAS->NAS backup now.
There are two basic approaches.
Connect the USB drive(s) to the NAS, and use the built-in backup job feature. If you go this route, then make sure the USB drive is formatted as NTFS so you can retrieve the files if the NAS fails from your PC. There is a trick to let you choose Rsync for the backup protocol, which lets you do incremental backups, which run much faster once the initial backup is complete.
Connect the USB drive to your PC, and back up over the network. Best to use a utility to back up the NAS (FreeFileSync is is one of several options that supports incremental backup).
Either way, the backups can be scheduled, run unattended, and can be incremental. With (2) it can be set up to power up the PC, make the backup, and then shut down the PC when finished.
If you use the private "home" shares on the NAS (with more than one user account), then the first method is the best. Otherwise they are pretty much equivalent. If you want to go with (1), just post back, and we can give you some help in setting up the backup jobs.
What do you recommend for the hard drive to use as external backup? I'm thinking I need to look at some better option like a separate drive and case.
I'm not using any external drives at the moment, so I have no recommendations there. Many external drives use a technology called SMR (shingled magnetic recording), and they can be very slow when doing a lot of writes. Getting a separate drive+enclosure lets you avoid that problem, since you can just choose a CMR NAS-purposed drive like the Seagate Ironwolf or WD Red Plus. A separate enclosure is also more flexible, as you can use it to test drives using your PC.
There are lots of enclosures out there - you can find USB 3 enclosures for a single drive with independent power supplies for about $25 US. If you want the flexibility to connect either to the NAS or a PC, then you should get one with a USB-A connector, and not USB-C. A separate power adapter lets you use the drive with either a USB 2 port or a USB 3 port (USB 2 ports often don't provide enough power).
Multi-bay enclosures cost quite a bit more, but of course would let you add additional drives if you need more capacity later on. I do have an inexpensive USB-C dock for two drives (which doesn't enclose the hard drives) that I use for testing disks (and erasing them when I take them out of service). I wouldn't recommend something like that for daily backup, as the drives aren't fully secured in the enclosure (for instance, they'd fall out if the dock tipped over).
Re: RN104 Long in The Tooth What Would You Recommend Upgrading to?
I ordered and received a Sabrent external drive bay with USB-A (3.0) connector and power supply
I ordered and am currently waiting on a WD Red Pro 20tb drive for my initial first backup of the NAS.
If all goes successful with this initial backup I will then consider upgrading the RN104 from the 4x4gb drives to 8tb drives.
The NAS currently shows I have 2tb of free space available and is under the 30% limit the NAS says is needed for a safe file system storage.
l did look at the multi drive enclosures and this may be something I will go for in the future. But, at this time I am not wanting to have a large multi enclosure taking up space on the desk. I plan to keep the 20tb drives on a shelf or in a cabinet for safe keeping and only taking out for regular backups.
Since I receive Western Digital's email regularly, I took advantage of an offer where I got two of these 20tb drives in a bundle offer and saved greatly from what I was about to buy on Amazon.
I appreciate all your help and advice on this subject.
Re: RN104 Long in The Tooth What Would You Recommend Upgrading to?
Stephen,
I just wanted to finish this thread by thanking you once again for your excellent help and to also give some stats on what has transpired with my backup to an external drive. I had never used the USB 3.0 port on the back of this RN104 unit until now. After receiving the Sabrent powered, USB3.0, flip top enclosure and inserting the 20tb WD Red Pro drive and connecting to this port, all went well. I was able to create a backup job for everything in the NAS. A total of 10tb. I started on Feb. 1, 2024 @4:26 PM and the log shows it completed on Feb. 4, 2024 @5:22 AM. Calculating the numbers gives me around 45Mbs transfer rate, which is what I expected. So, now it's off to the races and to upgrade the 4X4tb WD Red Pro drives in the NAS to 4X8tb WD Red Pro drives to increase my space. I will mark this as solved now.
