What is the maximum size for an external USB hard drive for backing up the RNDP6310?

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nowthennet wrote:

What is this SMR business? What does that mean?

 

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SMR: shingled magnetic recording.

http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/seagate-8tb-archive-hdd-review,2-822.html wrote:
SMR, in its simplest terms, is a method of overlaying data tracks, much like shingles on a roof, to increase data storage density. One of the greatest aspects of SMR technology is its low cost per gigabyte; the Seagate model we have under the microscope retails for 3 cents-per-GB. However, SMR comes with inherent performance constraints, and some implementations have limited compatibility with existing systems

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Normal drives shipping today are "PMR" - perpendicular magnetic recording.

With SMR technology, the storage is increased by overlapping the data tracks on the disk. This is cost-effective (which is why these drives are cheaper than PMR 8 TB drives).  The downside is that when you write to a track, the next track is trashed because of the overlap. In order to maintain data integrity, the drive has to "ripple" the write until it reaches an unused track (or the end of the drive).  

For instance, if you write to track 100, the disk firmware actually needs to do this:

read 101, write 100

read 102, write 101,

read 103, write 102

...

The drive firmware does this in the background automatically with a large cache, but this will greatly slow down write speed if you are doing a lot of sustained writes. And there still been compatibility issues.  The linux community has patched drivers, and Netgear made some of their own modifications to the OS 6 firmware.

None of these are available on your older Pro-6.

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nowthennet wrote:

Where can I find instructions for updating the BIOS and upgrading to 0S6?

 

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Both are in this forum.  OS6 isn't supported on the older NAS by Netgear, although they have fixed some bugs that are specific to older NAS anyway.  The upgrade is destructive, so you will need to back up your data somewhere.

The bios upgrade is here: http://www.readynas.com/download/addons/x86/4.2/BIOS_Update_Package_0.5-x86.bin  You install it like an add-on.