Forum Discussion

jimk1963

Luminary

Jul 21, 2019

Add SSD drive(s) to RN528X

My RN528x is configured with 8x4TB Toshiba HDD's. Product arrived preconfigured with X-RAID, which chose a RAID 6 configuration. System reports about 21TB usable out of 32TB. I've only loaded up 2TB ...

adorso87

Tutor

Jul 24, 2019

jimk1963 wrote:
4) RN528x motherboard contains an SSD slot on its backside, unpopulated. I wonder - if I populated that slot wth the m.2 SATA III SSD, would the motherboard use that SSD as cache? Or would it just be ignored? I'm no Linux expert, so if the answer has to do with some kind of invasive OS inspection, it might be over my head

I have an RN524X, I pulled the back panel off and sure enough I found an unpopulated M.2 connector and an unused PCI-e X4 slot. I populated the M.2 with an Intel 660p nvme and booted the machine back up. After getting into the backend of the unit I clicked on every tab, every link, on every page and could not find the nvme drive anywhere. I would say that the M.2 slot is for a wifi connection, a way for your phone to connect to it with better range than bluetooth. As for the PCI-e slot I would say it's for future proofing the unit and cannot be accessed just yet. This was checked on the 6.10.1 firmware. I attached photos of backside of the board these features are on the RN524X, RN526X and the RN528X. Netgear what are they for!?

StephenB

Guru - Experienced User

Jul 27, 2019

adorso87 wrote: After getting into the backend of the unit I clicked on every tab, every link, on every page and could not find the nvme drive anywhere.

I'm not suprised at that. I think you'd likely need to manually format the drive and mount it (from ssh).

jimk1963
Luminary
Jul 27, 2019
There is no SSD drive in the 528, only an empty slot. Original question was whether populating this slot would accomplish anything.
- StephenB
  Guru - Experienced User
  Jul 27, 2019
  Understood, and adorso87 said he tried it putting an SSD in that slot. He then found that nothing changed in the web ui - though it's conceivable the added nvme SSD could still be used by the NAS if it were manually formatted and mounted with ssh.
  - adorso87
    Tutor
    Jul 29, 2019
    StephenB wrote:
    though it's conceivable the added nvme SSD could still be used by the NAS if it were manually formatted and mounted with ssh.
    
    I'm not familure with SSH, if you have any info for me to give it a try link it for me and I'll see if I can get it to work. In the end the drive wouldn't be able to do much, cacheing on ReadyNAS isn't worth the extra expense.