How does bitrot protection actually work?

mdgm wrote:
Bitrot protection is suitable for some use cases and can be quite resource intensive. So only using it on shares for which it is appropriate to use it with is good.

Overall, I think its frustrating for RN100 series users to be told repeatedly "hey, all these features in the GUI - they aren't for you...". Netgear should provide some real data on the performance impacts of checksums, AntiVirus, RAID-6 on all platforms. Then users can figure out if the benefits outweigh the costs for them, and make better choices on their platform investments,

Do you mean the repair is resource intensive, or the the protection itself (checksums + CoW)?

I'm not seeing much impact on my RN102, which leads me to think that the issue you are talking about is CoW fragmentation. That of course is not easily quantified - and fragmentation kills performance on all platforms.