Curious if anyone knows if it is possible to upgrade the memory on the RN516? From what I can gather, the RN516 is using one slot (2 available) with a single innoDisk 4GB 1600 W/ECC DIMM, model # M3CW-4GHJ3C0C-E 1302.
I would think anything compatible with the following:
I would suggest running at least a few passes of the memory test (one of the boot menu options) before trusting the memory. The memory test progress can be seen on a display connected to your NAS via HDMI.
Note even then the memory might not be compatible. If there is data corruption due to using 3rd party memory NetGear will be unable to help you recover your data.
I just recently did this upgrade as well and am quite pleased with the result. I purchased the 2x8gb set from Crucial, and did the necessary memory test for several hours before doing a normal restart. It was nice to attach an HDMI display to confirm important details that both modules were recognized and get a sense of how the tests were running. After a while, though, the only information that mattered was what was showing up on the FP already. 🙂
I did wonder whether there any decent descriptions of how to liberate the mobo to perform the upgrade. For others who may similarly be wondering when they start to investigate this as an option, here was my experience...
Unlike my Pro 6, where the mobo faces toward the side panel (the side with the perforation for the CPU fan to draw in air), the 516 has the mobo facing away from the side. So you'll just see metal there after removing the outer case. There are four Phillips/socket-type screws (two on top and two on bottom) in the recessed slots of the sheet metal. Upon removing those four, you can gently swing out the side panel (the mobo is mounted to) from the front panel end. Careful since it's not actually hinged and the are cables attached to it on the inside. I was then able to swing it out /just enough/ to access the DIMM slots and replace the memory without incident.
There may indeed be a better description of how to access the mobo for upgrade, but I wasn't able to find it. 🙂
Whether it will have an impact I think depends upon your workload. One telling aspect are the figures Netgear posts comparing the scalability of the 516 and 716 for #users, simultaneous connections, etc. That's great for pure file sharing. But if you plan to run certain add-ons on your NAS, that could easily change your workload profile... perhaps heavier CPU, or pushing lots of large files. Some of these could have an impact on (a) the memory required for processes and (b) the potential benefit of having a larger file buffer held in memory. I run the add-ons: automatic, Transmission, PLEX, DVBLink. The busiest bees, memory wise, are PLEX and DVBLink. And, not surprisingly, these two will also be doing decent I/O to decently large files... depending on simultaneous recordings and multiple playback clients, etc.
So... yes, in my case I noticed a real difference having extra breathing room in RAM. Your workload may differ...
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'.)
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.
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.
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.
Forget it's a NAS for the moment. It runs Debian... it's a Linux server, folks. Albeit it has specialized software installed on it, but underneath it's just Linux. mdgm is correct in that if it's not swapping them memory may not be a critical upgrade. But it also tries to use as much RAM for FILE CACHE. And we all know it's much faster to serve data from DRAM than it is disk... even if it's SSD, depending on I/O channel bandwidth.
So, again, it's up to your workload. If you /very frequently/ access tons of tiny files or a decent number of huge files, it's up to how well the most recent stuff fits in the available cache space. You may not swap, but you may spend more time hitting disks to pull data back in.
Swapping is more often a factor of how much RAM applications allocate. And in this area, that would include things like the web server, file services, and any add-ons you install. For most this won't be a problem, since they tend to be pretty tiny. But in my case, I find that PLEX (esp when you do lots of batch transcoding, like for syncing transcoded stuff to clients for offline viewing) and DVBLink (for OTA and cable TV recording) tend to like a fair amount of RAM. But if I'm transcoding and watching a program and my Mac kicks off a Time Machine backup, I'd rather not sit through stuttering. So for me the decision was fairly easy to do the memory upgrade.
Where memory is concerned... it's about swapping AND available file cache space. 🙂 But, more generally, it's about your specific workload. And most workloads will probably not require more than default RAM.
Hi guys, just found out about the OS6 upgrade possibility for my utra6 so just started backup of my data.
I was also looking into a possible and the usefulness of a memory upgrade and found this thread. How do I know if my NAS is swapping a lot to determine I can benefit from a memory upgrade? I use sabnzbd and sickbeard and that's more or less it for now. Might be that I have more packages to choose from after upgrading to OS6...
If you download the logs zip file, one of the logs for the memory shows this. You can see how much is being used for caching and how much swap is used. If you are using a lot for caching but not swap then a memory upgrade likely won't make a significant difference. However if you are using your swap a lot then a memory upgrade may make some difference.
We don't support memory upgrades, but you can do them on our models which use Intel CPUs e.g. the Ultra 6. If you do do one on be sure to run at least a few passes of the memory test boot menu option.
How is the memory test result presented on both the Ultra's as well as the RN516? The RN516 has a video out (does that work?) but the Ultra's only a video header.
