Is newer going to be better?

We've made a lot of progress since OS6 was first released last year. Our latest release 6.2.0 has some performance improvements.

I would consider the 516 the unit to upgrade to from a Pro Business Edition.

The 314 would be the unit to upgrade from a Pro 4 to get comparable performance.

Having said that for many tasks the gigabit ethernet connection may be the bottleneck.

How do you use your Pro BE? Do you use Teaming? Do you run add-ons? If so, which ones?

I see you've upgraded the RAM in the Pro BE. Have you changed anything else? If you have replaced the CPU with a faster one that would make it even more clear that the 516 or the 716x would be the way to go.

Thanks for the information.

The unit was initially used for a small business workgroup. Now, however, it's just a home server used by four.

It's used for Apple Time Machine for three Macs and shared storage. It also is the place where I store all of my HD video material by directly copying the SD cards. I then import what I want on my local machine for editing. The HD files take up quite a bit of space, but the unit is less than half full (full being about 11TB with the one redundant drive).

I do have Ethernet CAT5E or 6 cabling plugged into both ports. And the only change I made to the unit was the addition of the extra GB RAM. Other than that I have simply upgraded the drives over the years from 1.5TB to 2TB to 3TB. No replacement CPU or anything else.

I don't know whether I need the extra horsepower, but I suppose you're right. I should be looking at the ReadyNAS 516 (or maybe the Synology 1513+).

Netgear's response to my inquiry for support a few months ago was disappointing. The unit was just past its 5 year warranty period they offered no options, even when I told them I'd be glad to pay for it. But, I guess Apple wouldn't help if my 5-year-old Mac Pro started giving me problems. I suppose getting 5 years out of a NAS in some ways is similar.

Thank you again.

Well if you don't need the extra horsepower the 314 would be a good option.

ReadyNAS OS 6.2 now has personal time machine. So instead of sharing the one TM share each user can have their own TM backup destination with separate quotas.

When we used the current unit in the work environment the main concern going in was if it would be fast enough for ten or so people to access files concurrently. That turned out to be a complete non-issue.

When we moved the ReadyNASBP to the house we didn't know if it would be able to stream videos and music to the four of us at the same time. That too never seemed to put a strain on the machine. In fact we tried to see if we could stress it and once had each of the four Macs stream four or five videos at the same time, but that worked fine too. These were a mix of both HD and SD videos, but still the performance was impressive. In daily use the instances where all of us are streaming even one thing at a time are infrequent.

If the 314 offers similar performance that sounds like a great option.

It should offer similar performance.

The RN516 is a better choice if you want to do a lot of on-the-fly transcoding - which is helpful if you want to do over-the-internet streaming. The RN314 can do some on-the-fly transcoding, but the faster CPU in the 516 is helpful if you need that capability. It sounds like you are not doing that now though.