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RN104 Long in The Tooth What Would You Recommend Upgrading to?
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...
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.
Pstreicher wrote:
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.
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.
I had installed the Plex app but never used it.
Pstreicher wrote:
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.
Pstreicher wrote:
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.
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.
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