First impressions of RN626X and then some

I finally made the jump from my old Ultra 4 Plus to the new RN626X and so far it's a very nice leap forward.  I did have some challenges getting started which probably could have been avoided if I read a bit more prior to just jumping in feet first.  

• The 626X is much bigger in physical size than the Utlra 4 Plus.  Although, it does have 6 bays compared to 4 so that adds size and weight.  I noticed something rattling around inside the 626X when it arrived and therefore proceeded to take it apart.  Unfortunately, I was never able to find what it was but suspect it was a small piece of solder moving around.  So far it hasn't effected anything so I'm not going to worry about it but was alarmed at first that it may have to be sent back.  

• I had six 4TB drives arrive ahead of the new NAS and decided that I'd test two of them in the Ultra 4 Plus NAS first and the 4 other in my home Win10 PC. So I removed the first 2TB drive (bay 3) and inserted the 4TB drive into the Ultra 4. The Ultra 4 of course began it's test and then later expanded the volume. I rinse and repeated this with the 2nd drive on bay 4 with the same results. Cool, all seems well, right? :smileylol: Well, I failed to realize that once you expand a volume you can't go back and trust me I tried re-inserting the 2TB drives. :smileymad: Anyhow, the new NAS doesn't have the expansion limitations of the old NAS so it's no biggy to later remove those 4TB drives from the Ultra 4 Plus, put them into the RN626X and then reset the Ultra 4 Plus. I'll do that once I'm confortable with the RN626X being my primary NAS and no longer feel the need to retain the old NAS and data. I'll eventually make the Ultra4 Plus my backup to the RN626X but currently not in a hurry since all my data is backup to a 8TB drive on my PC. It's best not to take chances either way.

• So I then moved onto installing the remaining four 4TB drives into the RN626X.  However, those drives were previously formatted and had data on them which sends up red flags when this condition is detected by the NAS.  Unfortunately, it means I was unable to detech my NAS using the ReadyCloud and therefore had to install RAIDar.  However, RAIDar requires JAVA version 6 or higher which is not bundled with it so I had to grabbed that too.  So I finanlly get RAIDar installed/launched and see it prompts me to format the disk since it knows they were previously used.  It literally said:  Previously formatted disk(s) detected (Dirty Disks).  I had to type DESTROY in a pop-up box before it would format them and begin building the volume.  Fun stuff and a bit of a pain to some extent, but to be fair the little manual that came with the unit does mention about using drives previously formatted.  I will say the toolless bays for holding hard drives is a nice touch compared to having to secure them with screws on the Ultra 4 Plus.  That said, I don't really plan on routinely changing out my hard drives so it won't matter much in the long run.

• The RN626X arrived with firmware 6.5.2 so I immediately upgraded it to 6.6 using the upgrade feature from the Admin page and had no issues.  The initial volume took about 16 hours to complete if that helps anyone guage the length of the process. I moved onto creating my shares and setting up my permissions/groups/users/network protocols/etc once the volume was completed.  I don't believe you have to wait for the volume to complete but I choose to keep it simple and wait it out.  It took me a while to figure out the permissions and structure order as it has been some time since I had to mess with any of that on my Utlra 4 Plus.  Netgear does provide some documentation but it can still be confusing even for those that are Linux savvy.  Netgear also provides everyone access to all the shares by default which I understand why but it's highly unlikely most are going to want to keep it that way.  It probably took me a better part of a day to figure it all out and lock it down so it wasn't a free for all for everyone/users.  That said, it is extremely important to under stand this part of the installation as it can and does effect how the NAS can be used.  I would imagine a LOT of question get asked on this piece alone. 

Observations/Comments/Questions/Recommendations:

- To Gracefully power down the NAS push the power button 3 times.

- To hard shut it down just hold the power button which is the same on my old Ultra 4 Plus.

- I'm unable to find a logout button from the Admin page. Does one exist or is it simply not needed?

- Looks like Netgear took a page out of Microsoft's page with too much white background on the Admin pages. It be nice if the Netgear Admin Page allowed you to change the background color to say dark grey such as a Dark Material Themes that seem to be ubiquitous.

- No Volume maintenance? Disk scrubbing with Auto Parity Fix? Online File System Consistency Check? Is none of that necessary now? Is that what Bit Rot does?

- NAS is set to a power on/off schedule but I'm unable to turn off the Power Alert when it's a result of the schedule. I really don't need an email on it every day it shuts down due to the power schedule. Is there a setting I'm missing?

- 10G ports will eventually cut down on transferring times of data from old to new NAS. It won't help now from my Ultra 4 Plus to my RN626X but will on the next iteration. It certainly will encourgage me to consider 10G NIC for my PC and a 10G switch in the near future.

- The RN626X holds a steady 115 MB/s write transfers over a Gigbit connection using jumbo frames. My PC actually has a GigE (switch is GigE too and supports jumbo frames) and I'm using the 10GigE port on the RN626X. My previous NAS Ultra 4 Plus saw about 80 MB/s write transfers over the same infrastructure. I should mention this is for very large files like 1080P video files around 20-30 GB a piece. It does slow down if there are a lot of smaller files/folders and they are deep within the tree structure.

- There is no DDNS support built-in yet some of their routers support it natively. http://www.noip.com/support/knowledgebase/what-devices-support-no-ips-dynamic-dns-update-service/ Newer Netgear routers are fully integrated with No-IP’s DDNS service so I expect their NAS to be too. I see the Synology NAS supports it so hopefully it will be added in a future firmware update.

- The only Apps I have installed are Plex Media Server and AntiVirus Plus. I have no idea why, but Plex Media Server is not on the App Store so I had to grab it from them directly and it works without any issues. The App store is a mess to be nice about it and really needs some attention by Netgear. The Apps are almost as important as the hardware piece of a NAS so I'm hoping Netgear is working hard on updating/improving the App store or at the very least encouraging developers financially to develope and support apps. A significant number of the Apps on that store are incompatible due to OS6.6 or simply obsolete/abandon by the developers for one reason or another. I'd certainly be willing to pay developers a reasonable fee just like most of us do today via Apple/Android stores on our mobiles.

On a side note, I was able to transcode three 1080P MKV movies at the same time without any issues.  I suspect the 626 can do more but I don't have enough devices to test that theory.  All I can say is my Ultra 4 Plus could not transcode 1080P without buffering.