Got my shiny RN104 and created a RAID 5 configuration with 4 x 2TB drives with default X-RAID (should I risk selecting Flexible?).
About 20 hours later the device was ready to use. Some time later I realised that NFS had serious problems (Virtual Machines took hours to migrate after trying to figuring out that the default data path included "/data/" as the prefix).
I'd like to mention all the other problems but don't feel like writing a book.
After trawling through Google I decided to upgrade to 6.1.3 (manual upgrade was only available as device is behind proxy/firewall and has no settings for this provision).
Anyway, upgraded to 6.1.3 and this fixed the NFS problem and some other issues (unfortunately, this upgrade bricked the RAID 5 configuration and I lost all my beloved virtual machines). So much for the snapshot feature that is supposed to protect everything. By the way, how much space do these ssnapshots take up?
At this point I realised I was part of the Netgear Research and Development Team (my happiness was downgraded and my anger upgraded).
After another 20 hours for the RAID 5 rebuild things were looking up (NFS, after async was enabled, looked quite workable).
I then proceeded to copy many important files to shares using SMB (Windows File Sharing). Copy speed (write) was quite good at about 48 MB/s.
Then I tried copying data from the RN104 shares (2 MB/s was the best speed I could get!!!!!). Totally unacceptable especially since SMB (Windows File Sharing) would probably be one of the most important protocols!
I am waiting for the fix to come out in a firmware upgrade but when it finally does - can I risk destroying my RAID 5 configuration again?
Don't forget, I can't get all my data off the device as I only have a read speed of 2MB/s.
By the way Netgear, can you make a provision for a WINS client setting (for a WINS Server on the network)? Your previous models accommodated this setting.
I look forward to some positive input (from both Netgear and users) as I am using the RN104 in a production environment and need to be confident with its performance (like some of the previous models).
Please don't focus on one part of my communication and think you have answered it completely (this is a common ploy).
You don't have to wait for the RAID sync to complete before placing data on the box. The file system will stripe data in real-time even if the general RAID striping is going on in the background.
Snapshots will use at much free space as possible for additional versions/restore points. As you add more data to your device, snapshots will be pruned automatically to remove some granularity (less restore points). This is done automatically. There is a white paper on Continuous Data Protection (ie. Snapshots) http://www.netgear.com/landing/storage/ ... ess.html#6
