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General comments regarding to 104 device

rit1
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General comments regarding to 104 device

I'll be honest, I purchased the 104 as in the UK its price has dropped so much that its just about the cheapest 4 disk bay device I could find. I also had a number of old disks that I could put in it, so there was no real extra costs involved in the deployment of the 104. In fact I spent more on the 2 3TB drives that I have installed directly into my main PC.

The aim of the 104 is to provide a central 4.5TB backup device for all my other systems, so the speed of data retrieval is more important to me that the speed of placing data onto the drive, which will happen with a number of backup/sync tools.

Here are some views/comments regarding what I have seen while setting the device up.

- If you want an easy life and use the XRAID feature you are unable to create a RAID 10 based system with 4 drives as it automatically selects RAID 5 for 3 and 4 disk based systems. This is a pain if you want the best performance out of the device, rather than the most storage.

- While NetGear talk a lot about the use of btrfs as the file system, they do not warn you that the RAID 5 feature is provided by low level xor-ing of disks rather than btrfs's block level RAIDing. The impact of this is seen as drives are added/replaced or rebuilt after a power failure as the full xor-ing process on large drives will take a very long time. My 3rd and 4th 1.5TB drives each took over 13 hours to add.

- The CPU is just about able to cope with a single task/user, do not expect it to provide good performance for a number of active users/PCs. From my monitoring of the processes its often the CPU that is limiting the performance of the device, rather than the raw performance of the disks. This can often been seen if you turn things like the virus scanning or compression on as these add to the processor load. The worse case seems to be if a drive is being added/re-added as the xor process burns CPU cycles.

- At times processes seem to be active for no real reason. As an example when I first tried to copy files via rsync I found that the DLNA process was running at 50% of CPU load. Once disable and the reenabled this problem went way and rsync could then run a lot faster. The key issue is that you have no way of telling this from the web GUI and have to connect to the device via SSH to see what is going on.

- It currently does not support disk spin down when not being accessed. This means its pulling a lot of power, even when not in use. It does support wake on LAN and a basic power schedule so it can be controlled remotely. What is missing is a dedicated tool/app to cause it to shutdown.

- It seems to have a habit of locking up when put under load. As this means you have to pull the plug there is a good chance that on start up one of the disks will be found to be out of sync and so the xor process will run to re-sync the disk. This makes the device very slow for writes as the xor process involves lots of disk I/O and CPU time.


Tools I'm using with the device (All Win7 based and all are free)

Putty - this is a nice SSH terminal that allows me to access the NAS and view the process list via TOP

DeltaCopy - a nice Windows based rsync tool. Rsync is a good way keep large directory structures in sync as it does not have to scan the directory across the network. It also support command line options that can limit the amount of data sent per second.

EaseUS ToDo Backup - a nice disk level backup tool that supports both full and incremental backups.

WOL - Magic Packet Sender - this sends the wake on LAN network packet to start the device.

As I first noted, the key thing this device has going for it is it's cost and as such its worth what I paid for it £168, but I would not be happy with it if I had paid the 'list' price which seems to be nearly twice that. As a target device for backups and the sharing of things like videos it works well, but do not expect it to support an environment with a number of users who want fast write access.
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garyaj
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Re: General comments regarding to 104 device

The locking up problem is becoming unmanageable for me. The 104 is spending two days re-synching and then locks up after a day or so. (I've submitted a request for help to support.)

I probably deserve this. I was running an NV+ and lost 3TB of files last year, mostly due to my ignorance. I followed the Manual instructions for recovering from a lockup and it promptly wiped my data. The NV+ locked up again a couple of weeks ago and this time I decided to buy a new RN104 and transfer the data, in the hope that NTGR had improved their software with the later model...

Any other fool would have switched to a different manufacturer I suppose and not risk being burnt twice. ("Fool me once...")

It really annoys me because this forum is the best thing going for ReadyNAS devices. Great support and interesting insights into the various devices.
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