Convince me to stay with ReadyNAS

jelockwood wrote:
NetGear seem to be neglecting the ReadyNAS product line. Apparently even the top most models the 3220 and 4220 are only SATA II based whereas everyone else making computers or servers or NAS boxes has long ago moved on to SATA III.

With hard disks SATA II ports vs SATA III ports doesn't really make much difference.

jelockwood wrote:
Worse still NetGear continue to fail to add support for authenticating via an LDAP server and limit authentication to either local accounts or an Active Directory server. As far as I can see every other NAS maker does support LDAP including QNAP and Synology in particular.

I think there is a community app for LDAP on apps.readynas.com, though I haven't tried it.

jelockwood wrote:
As a more esoteric issue, none of the ReadyNAS models can host Virtual Machines (they can only store the VM disk files). QNAP for example seem able to actually run VMs within their servers.

There is a long running thread on running VirtualBox on the ReadyNAS Pro and you can run into on e.g. the 516 as well. We don't support memory upgrades and when running Virtual Machines you really need as much memory as possible. The 716x does come with a quad-core CPU and 16GB RAM and would be the best desktop ReadyNAS to run VMs on with no hardware modifications. Furthermore the ReadyNAS units with Intel Atom CPUs don't support VT-x. This may change in the future as I believe some newer Atom CPUs have VT-x support. Without VT-x you can't run 64-bit VMs which does limit the usefulness of running VMs on a NAS as more and more OSes go 64-bit only. The 516 and 716x both have VT-x. The 12-bay rack mounts would as well.

jelockwood wrote:
NetGear are also proving incredibly slow to approve new hard drives, they have a very few 4TB drives listed but no 5TB or 6TB drives at all. QNAP have a lot more 4TB drives listed and already also list some 5TB and 6TB drives.

The 300 series and 516 both have e.g. the WD60EFRX on the list. We test drives before adding them to the list. Not all hard drives are suitable for NAS use especially for use in 12-bay NAS units. So we prefer to take a cautious approach to adding drives.

I will ask our hard disk qualification team for an update for where we are at with regards to 6TB drives in 12-bay rackmount units.

jelockwood wrote:
The older ReadyNAS models also do not support SMB2 even though a compatible version of SAMBA has been available for ages - it is not necessary to use SAMBA4 to implement SMB2, SMB2 support was added in SAMBA 3.6. The newer OS 6 models do support SMB2, this affects speed.

You may like 4.2.27 then. In 4.2.27-T3 we upgraded from samba 3.5.22 to samba 3.6.24 to address some security vulnerabilities. 4.2.27-T4 is now available: http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=70385

jelockwood wrote:
- File system expansion (assuming RAID expansion is possible), I get the impression that the new(er) OS 6 ReadyNAS models with BTRFS can pretty much expand unlimited now unlike the older ReadyNAS models which had expansion limits above which you had to factory reset, is this correct? Again what about the competition?

Yes, all the x86_64 models do. The 102, 104 and 2120 cannot expand past 16TB. I believe that the limits may still apply to the competition as they still use EXT4, but you'd probably have to ask them. To be able to expand an EXT4 volume past 16TB you'd need a relatively new kernel and to create the filesystem on that with relatively new filesystem utilities. You'd also have to be cautious not to expand volumes past 16TB that are not safe to do so (would lead to data corruption where it is not safe), which may mean that they don't allow expansion past 16TB because of the difficulty in determining whether it is safe to do so or not.

jelockwood wrote:
- Speed, issues like SATA III, SMB2, etc.

The new models are fast and you have the choice to use features such as unlimited snapshots that provide better protection for your data (though there is a performance trade-off). You can choose to use unlimited snapshots with some shares, but not with others.

As for SATA II see my comment above.

We have samba 4.0.x in all ReadyNAS OS releases from 6.0.0 through to samba 4.0.21 in 6.1.9.

jelockwood wrote:
- Support for LDAP authentication?

There is a community app, but I don't know how reliable or not that is.

jelockwood wrote:
- Support for forked-daapd?

Yes, we have forked-daapd in OS6 and we are updating it to newer versions over time.

jelockwood wrote:
- Support for Spotlight indexing?

Support for spotlight indexing in Netatalk came in Netatalk 3.1.0. We have Netatalk 3.0.x in all ReadyNAS OS releases from ReadyNAS OS 6.0.0 through to Netatalk 3.0.7 in ReadyNAS OS 6.1.9. Once we move to Netatalk 3.1.x then adding support for spotlight indexing might be possible, but it would have to be assessed in a range of environments to see if it has a negative impact on use of services other than AFP.

jelockwood wrote:
- Any other comments?

We have a major update to ReadyNAS OS, ReadyNAS OS 6.2 on the way.

Regarding our support for our business class products we offer
- Limited 5-year hardware warranty
- Lifetime chat support
- 5 year NBD shipping coverage
- Local phone numbers for most countries for our 90-day 24x7 phone support.
- ProSupport contracts available e.g. if you need additional phone support.

See http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/26066/~/readynas-support-and-warranty

Some NAS vendors don't offer NBD replacement. Can you afford to wait e.g. a few weeks for a NAS vendor to replace a failed unit? For business use checking the support options available to you is important.

dsm1212 wrote:
*If* you are a developer, the readynas is pretty easy to access and extend. Even though Netgear uses words like "voids your warranty", I have never seen that card played and certainly not for normal issues (failed drives, fans, etc).

If you enable SSH doing a factory default would restore full software support. Support may be denied if misuse of SSH leads to a problem, though in some cases we may offer support for a fee for mishaps caused through use of SSH, but it does depend on the issue. If your data is still there, there would certainly be options to assist with data recovery.

Replacing the CPU would void your warranty. If you used SSH somehow to e.g. lower the fan speed, which could cause the hardware to overheat then that would have warranty implications.