It generally takes a long time to initialize disk drives for RAID -- hours to days. Depending on HW specs and disk drive capacity/size, initialization times will vary. During that initialization time, the NAS is usable but performance is severely degraded. New users may be surprised by how long it takes, and how slow the NAS is performing. I'm sharing my experience here so (new) users know what to expect.
I just bought my RN104 several days ago. I also bought 3 x 3 TB Western Digital Red NAS drives. I installed all 3 drives and powered on the NAS. I knew from reading other posts the NAS would automatically initialize the drives for X-RAID2, RAID 5 mode. I am OK with this and left everything default -- no antivirus, etc. While initializing, I did not transfer any data to the drives. During initialization, the LCD status monitor gave percentages and estimated times that made me think the whole process would take about 1.5 days to complete. However, logs seem to indicate it rebooted itself and either restarted initialization or continued initialization on another disk. I'm not exactly sure of the exact steps during initialization and I haven't looked at the logs in detail yet... but it seems to me the OS and status monitor need to clarify the percentage and time estimates a little bit more. After about 2.5 days, initialization appears to be finally complete.
Tonight I plan to do some mass file transfers and post my performance results to the "Post your performance results" thread.
I'm my opinion, this product is about as easy as it gets for home users who want RAID mass storage. But new (non-IT) users should be aware of the initialization times...it takes a while, and users should not try to make performance measurements during initialization. I wonder if that's why I see a lot of posts from people complaining about their NAS being very slow.
