Hi. I have a ReadyNas Ultra 6 which I have used successfully although had a drive fail and another experience ATA errors during the rebuild of the spare that meant I could never get it back into redundant state (kept reporting as dead until rebooted then ok again until ATA error throw during resync). As a result I ended up taking three weeks to copy off all my data to several different places then get 6 new disks for the Ultra and setup as new before copying all the data back.
I am now a bit paranoid having got close to losing everything and so have purchased a second hand ReadyNAS Pro Business Edition to act as a redundant backup to the Ultra. My questions are:
- Should I use the Pro BE as my main NAS instead of the Ultra, and use the Ultra as the backup NAS? Will I see any performance benefit? - The Pro BE has NIC bonding. Will that increase speed (I use a 2014 Mac Pro so if I bonded the Mac Pro dual NIC's would that help too?). I have a Netgear GS748T Gigabit switch in between. - Is it beneficial to have snapshots on the Pro BE when looking to backup to the Ultra and is this reason enough to switch? - If I do decide to move the primary NAS to the Pro BE I would want to use the drives in the Ultra - if both on same firmware can I just take the drives out of the Ultra and put into the Pro and will it work? - What is the best method to backup? I have Carbon Copy Clone on my Mac Pro that I use for various backups to the NAS. That would work and do incremental backups and the Mac Pro is on all the time so not a problem to schedule during the night or once a week. But I see people reference Rsync but can't find an idiots guide that made sense!
Sorry for long post and it being slightly random and it being probably in the wrong area.
I'm not sure if how the performance of those two models will compare. You should be able to migrate the disks (powered down).
Bonding generally only increases performance if you have multiple flows. Usually that is multiple clients, but multiple flows between two machines would see some benefit also. Most of the time you won't see any benefit on one machine. You'd need to set up bonding on the switch as well as the NAS and the Mac.
If you are talking about backup between the two NAS, then rsync is definitely the way to go. Its not difficult to set up, it is built into frontview backup.
You're actually describing something very similar to my setup. I have the ReadyNAS Pro BE as my main NAS and the Ultra as my backup (backing up a 2011 iMac), but that is because my main NAS is also a Plex server and a Transmission client. To improve my Plex experience, I have upgraded the CPU in the Pro (which wasn't possible to do in the Ultra).
For file use only, I've seen little, if any difference in performance between either NAS using either AFP or SMB from a single Mac client. Some extra RAM in the Ultra wouldn't hurt though, 2GB would be enough an improvement.
My backup system: 1) use Carbon Copy Cloner to take regular full backups to a disk image file on the NAS 2) use Chronosync to back up a number of folders / items to a similarly named folder on the NAS (mainly media e.g.: photos / audio work, iTunes Library, certain work folders, user home folders 3) use RSYNC through backup jobs (set up on the secondary NAS) to back up shares on the main NAS daily / weekly as appropriate (depending on the share and frequency of update) 4) a third NAS offsite takes a monthly backup of the primary NAS (again using backup jobs on the NAS / RSYNC)
The secondary NAS is also set to wake during the night, run the backup and then power down. Running bonded NICs on both NASes but not on clients, with a smart Cisco switch. I'm not using snapshots currently, nor am I using Time Machine on the NAS - I have another external drive and Time Capsule for that purpose.
I'd bond the NASes together, but I'd experiment with bonding on the Mac to see whether it yields an improvement.
Happy to discuss in further detail via pm if you need any more detail on my setup / configuration. I'd be happy to run some better file transfer tests between both NASes if you needed more accurate numbers to help decide.
