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Forum Discussion
4 questions from a potential buyer
Hi,
I'm looking into getting a ReadyNAS unit and I'm very impressed with the quality this forum! I have 4 questions as I try to decide which unit I would like to get.
1) Dual GigE- I see that many of the units come with Dual GigE interfaces "with load balancing and failover". Can I get more detail on this? Will having both interfaces connected only give me redundancy or will I get 2x the I/O on the box than only 1 GigE interface? Are the links aggregated or two seperate, independent links? If 2x the I/O, would it be correct to say that, without link aggregation, I will only get that increase when multiple devices are hitting the NAS simulataneously?
2) USB3.0- The 2 drive unit has a USB 3.0 interface but none of the bigger units do. Any idea if that is going to change in the near future? Add on- I just noticed that the NV+ v2 units have USB3. How do to they compare to the Pro series? It looks like there is only 1 GigE port.
3) Factory resets- I've seen on various threads here where at some point, when people expand their capacity they need to do a factory reset which wipes out their data in the process. I can't quite understand what the requirement is for needing to do a factory reset and what can be done in the beginning to eliminate that need in the future. Is it a matter of starting with a volume size of X GB?
4) 6 drive unit max capacity- For the 6 drive units, I see the max capacity is 12TB. If I add 6 3TB drives, I am guessing the 12TB limit would only allow me to benfit from this if I had RAID6 (4x3TB + 2 redundancy drives). Is this correct? I'm seeing other threads talk about a 16GB limit. Not sure where that comes into play.
Thanks in advance for everyone's help!
I'm looking into getting a ReadyNAS unit and I'm very impressed with the quality this forum! I have 4 questions as I try to decide which unit I would like to get.
1) Dual GigE- I see that many of the units come with Dual GigE interfaces "with load balancing and failover". Can I get more detail on this? Will having both interfaces connected only give me redundancy or will I get 2x the I/O on the box than only 1 GigE interface? Are the links aggregated or two seperate, independent links? If 2x the I/O, would it be correct to say that, without link aggregation, I will only get that increase when multiple devices are hitting the NAS simulataneously?
2) USB3.0- The 2 drive unit has a USB 3.0 interface but none of the bigger units do. Any idea if that is going to change in the near future? Add on- I just noticed that the NV+ v2 units have USB3. How do to they compare to the Pro series? It looks like there is only 1 GigE port.
3) Factory resets- I've seen on various threads here where at some point, when people expand their capacity they need to do a factory reset which wipes out their data in the process. I can't quite understand what the requirement is for needing to do a factory reset and what can be done in the beginning to eliminate that need in the future. Is it a matter of starting with a volume size of X GB?
4) 6 drive unit max capacity- For the 6 drive units, I see the max capacity is 12TB. If I add 6 3TB drives, I am guessing the 12TB limit would only allow me to benfit from this if I had RAID6 (4x3TB + 2 redundancy drives). Is this correct? I'm seeing other threads talk about a 16GB limit. Not sure where that comes into play.
Thanks in advance for everyone's help!
3 Replies
If you are interested in this, you should get a Pro, not the ultra. The hardware is in the ultra, but the load balancing, link aggregation stuff is only in the business line (pro).elguappo wrote: 1) Dual GigE- I see that many of the units come with Dual GigE interfaces "with load balancing and failover". Can I get more detail on this? Will having both interfaces connected only give me redundancy or will I get 2x the I/O on the box than only 1 GigE interface? Are the links aggregated or two seperate, independent links? If 2x the I/O, would it be correct to say that, without link aggregation, I will only get that increase when multiple devices are hitting the NAS simulataneously?
Generally you will only get higher throughput is you have have multiple devices hitting the NAS simultaneously.
None of the devices exceed USB 2.0 speeds for backup, etc - even if they have the USB 3.0 hardware. So as far as I am concerned, you should ignore the USB 3.0 stuff. The NV+ V2 overall is less capable than the Pro line.elguappo wrote: 2) USB3.0- The 2 drive unit has a USB 3.0 interface but none of the bigger units do. Any idea if that is going to change in the near future? Add on- I just noticed that the NV+ v2 units have USB3. How do to they compare to the Pro series? It looks like there is only 1 GigE port.
There are two limits. One is that you cannot expand a volume beyond 16 TiB. The second is that you cannot grow a volume more than 8 TiB over its original size. The strategy to avoid these limits is to make sure you do your initial install with enough storage.elguappo wrote: 3) Factory resets- I've seen on various threads here where at some point, when people expand their capacity they need to do a factory reset which wipes out their data in the process. I can't quite understand what the requirement is for needing to do a factory reset and what can be done in the beginning to eliminate that need in the future. Is it a matter of starting with a volume size of X GB?
For instance, if you have a Pro 6, and you envision using 4 TB drives in dual-redundancy (RAID-6) mode. Then you would have a 16 TiB volume size - slightly less. If that is the max you envision, then you can do the initial install with four 3 TB drives (single redundancy XRAID-2). Then you would have 9 TiB in the initial volume. That lets you expand up to the full 16 TiB without the need for a factory default.
I think this is already answered above (assuming you meant 16 TB limit, not 16 GB).elguappo wrote: 4) 6 drive unit max capacity- For the 6 drive units, I see the max capacity is 12TB. If I add 6 3TB drives, I am guessing the 12TB limit would only allow me to benfit from this if I had RAID6 (4x3TB + 2 redundancy drives). Is this correct? I'm seeing other threads talk about a 16GB limit. Not sure where that comes into play. - Thanks so much for the reply!
If I understood the answers correctly, my takeaway is:
1) Dual GigE WILL provide more I/O but only when multiple computers acess the NAS simultaneously. If it's just one computer it will max out as if there was only 1 GigE interface. Redudancy/failover will still be there however.
2) USB 3.0 doesn't work better than USB 2.0
3) Making sure I start within 8TB of the max will prevent me from having to do a factory reset in the future.
I continue to be impressed with this forum. For the NetGear corprate guys, I want to make it known that having this high quality forum is a key point in my decision to go with a ReadyNas! - You should not buy from Netgear if you can afford Qnap or syno, cause software is crap and if you have problems to deal with you won't have any support... from support... except from members of this forum.
Hardware is fine but software is as important, i'm very disappointed with my duo v2, "softwarely speaking".
It's my humble opinion.
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