RN516 Memory Upgrade

Is it really necessary to upgrade to 16GB? I mean, it's 'just' a NAS. Won't doubling it to 8GB already have the same impact? (file Xfers, no real transcoding going on).

If doubling would already give plenty performance increase I could just get a similar stick of 4GB and be happy on the cheap...
(single 8GB stick won't be that smart I think since I'd like to use both memory channels for added 'oomph'.)

If your NAS is not swapping there is little point in the memory upgrade. Plus we don't support memory upgrades.

Ok, so 8GB total would be more than sufficient. I that case I'll gladly add another 4GB so as to use Dual channel and thereby doubling the memory bandwidth already.

Would the 516 be very critical about not 100% similar sticks of ram? I mean, it'd be ECC and 1600MHz and 1.35v and such, just not the same brand.

Well I don't think you'd need to upgrade the RAM but if you do you may as well go straight to 16GB (2x8GB).

Mwa... an extra 4GB costs around 45 euro's... 2x8GB costs about 170 euro's... I'd rather spend the extra money on that Xeon I'm eyeing ;)

My RN104 uses around 300Mbytes... To fill up the whole 4Gb you have some room... File transfers should impact the CPU more than the RAM, network is also likely to limit you before that, not to mention the disks. RAM is used for other applications than what is provided by Netgear, everything Netgear provides will fit in the 512Mb ram (otherwise they couldn't maintain a single OS version across their NAS), let's say 1Gb if you have many clients.
4gb is already more than enough unless you plan on using your NAS to run virtual machines, or use heavy clients like crashplan. It could make a difference if you host a webserver that serves several hundreds users per hour.
Other than that I don't think you will need it, you could install and launch all the applications available within your 4Gb ram. That's mainly a selling point for Netgear, people like numbers. But honestly 2Gb is enough for 95% of the users. and if you avoid using a cloud heavy client (by using dropbox or readynas vault that are already integrated for exemple), 1Gb is more than enough, even 512Mb could do but would be filled all the time.

I wouldn't bother upgrading, particularly if you are unsure of which RAM you need, manufacturers don't like people opening their boxes and you may have to revert to the original configuration each time you do a ticket.

Indeed I think a CPU upgrade makes more sense but you'll void the warranty for sure with that.

The x86_64 firmware is a separate image to the ARM firmware so the x86_64 firmware can be optimised to run best with 2GB+ of RAM.

Having said that you can run it with less RAM.

I thought they were exactly the same except the CPU compatibility part. I think the 314 has only 2Gb so this is clearly possible even with intel CPU. The point I wanted to make is that network is likely to top before ram, and disks can't go any faster than they are meant to, most disks get to 100-110Mbytes/s, so the NAS is bound to be limited to around 600Mbytes/s with that (unless using SSD) and I think the 516 has 2 gigabit cards that would limit it to 240Mbytes/s anyway, far far away from the ram limit, even if you get 20 concurrent connections. CPU should be able to handle that speed too even with antivirus on, it may have trouble if there is encryption + antivirus (and I'm not even sure about that).
This means that I don't think that upgrading RAM is a useful thing to do. CPU makes more sense, but I'm not sure this is useful either.

Well, I don't have any warranty so that's not going to hold me back.
I'll accept that more memory has limited value, but I am more going for the Dual Channel config which will increase performance as well on top of the alternate CPU I'm working on.

Honestly, you won't notice the dual channel difference either given the bandwidth already available.
As I said on the other thread, if you have the original purchase proof, I don't see how they could refuse to take it under warranty, so I wouldn't give them reason to bail out for a few millisecond difference while launching the admin page or a 1sec difference while booting.
If you were to run some virtualisation software or if you plan to use it as a server under heavy load (transcode, things like oracle applications...), upgrade to 16Gb (8Gb is merely good if you plan to use it as desktop computer). More over, having two chips that are identical reduces the incompatibility risk. But for home use, it is not worth it IMO.