Netgear Inc RN31600-100NAS ReadyNAS 316 6 Bay Network Attached Storage

As others have noted this isn't a true home system and I agree. Having worked for the largest storage company in the world in their NAS group for many years I felt pretty good about using this device. The manual or rather lack of one is amazing.On bootup: Got an error message on the front display 'Error: Unable to mount root raid drive'. I searched for this error at netgear and found nothing. Luckily I had read the previous reviews and remembered the need to do a factory reset. I suggest you use virgin drives in this device if at all possible to avoid the need to reset. Once done and factory reset option selected the device booted and proceeded to create the x-raid volume. Note, if you play with the volume and delete the x-raid volume there doesn't appear to be a way to re-select it and you'll have to do another factory reset. You can select raid 5/6/10 etc.Operation: Once you're up and running the GUI interface is nice. I did the firmware upgrade to 6.1.6 right away and did not have security issues with data copied on as others have. Until, I added NFS to a share.This brings me to netgears attempt at SMB/CIFS or lack of. If you're running older XP devices in a domain there appears to be no way to add that domain/workgroup to the readynas 316. I even installed the SMB Plus addon which allowed me to specify 2k/xp cifs but still no option to add the device to a domain. This caused issues with my WD HD Live TV device. Luckily I added NFS to the share and the WD was able to see the share as a NFS share.This brings me to media share. There's no way to add file associations. I use ISO's for all my video and they aren't recognized by the 316. Another reason I had to access the share via NFS.readyDLNA also doesn't appear to function as advertised. I tried to access it with my X-Box and couldn't figure out to add the key provided by the x-box to the dlna configuration. I'll try this access with a ps4 laterOtherwise I'm happy with the device overall but it clearly needs work, especially in the manual/help area.I would have rated this a 4 if there was a decent manual and online help. It would rate a 5 if there was a manual and all the functions worked properly. I currently have no intentions of upgrading the size of the drives installed (6 x 2tb WD black). If I do I'll add to this and let folks know how it goes.9/9/2014 - Things change.The unit is working well and I have no real complains except the cifs/smb compatibility.I have expanded the storage, kind of had to. I got 2 4tb drives for free. Removed the 2tb from slot 6, waited for the GUI to inform me the raid was degraded and inserted the new 4tb into the open slot. The rebuild began a minute or so later. 6-8 to rebuild, not terrible as these things go. When it finished I expected to see an additional 3+tb of space added. Nothing had changed. Some searching and reading on the forums and I discovered you have to change drives in pairs when increasing volume size. Unexpected.I pulled the drive from slot 5, waited for the GUI and inserted the second 4tb drive. 6-8 hours later I expected to be finished. Unfortunately, after the rebuild completes it took another 2-4 hours for the expansion to occur. I was expecting 3+tb of additional storage and only got 3.8tb. That's only the capacity of one drive. When I had 6 x 2tb I had just over 9tb available, approximately 1.5tb per drive. So that being said, 4 x 1.5 + 2 x 3.0 = 12tb. I seem to be missing 1+tb. Looks at the volumes in the GUI I should have 14.4tb according to capacity listed per each drive. Using those numbers I am missing the capacity of an entire 4tb drive. I'll be send a message to Netgear to see what they have to say. I'll continue to update as I go along.

I have had this NAS since 2013. I have used it as an overnight backup for my primary NAS, which is a Synology DS716+ii. The Synology runs RAID-0, has extra memory and runs multimedia services. The ReadyNAS has 12TB in RAID-6, and only runs Samba and Rsync, and runs for about 1 hour, every night, then shuts off. Overall the ReadyNAS is fast and reliable. I never had a problem with it. I really like the 6-disk layout - this is really the sweet-spot for efficiency in redundant storage. If your NAS has only 2 or 4 bays, it gets 50% to 75% of your drive capacity in RAID5, but the 6-disk NAS gives you 84% of that capacity. The ReadyNAS is compact, squeezing in 6 disks without much space in between.What I like about the RN316 - It's realiable. Has a relatively powerful Intel chip that does virtualization, and hardware encryption. It has a super-easy drive-caddy mechanism, which is better than Synology's. It's fast - my rsync backup runs at 100MB/s which has saturated the gigabit ethernet.What I don't like about it - the firmware is ugly and lacks features. Compared with Synology, the ReadyNAS firmware sucks. While it doesn't show CPU or memory usage, i use linux-dash app for that. The features and usability are so lacking, I only use it for storing files, but it's way more powerful than that.I will keep my ReadyNAS for many more years. I currently have 6x4TB enterprise drives. In the future, I think we'll see the singularity and the machines rise up to rule the world, before i need 6x14TB drives, so I'm sticking with ReadyNAS for backups. I will continue to use Synology for my primary NAS, for multimedia, virtualization and storage and a general-purpose server platform.

I owned several earlier models of Netgear Ultra 4 and 6. Had great success with them. The ReadyNAS line is a complete rewrite of the operating system... and though I think it is for the better... it has a way to go before it is ready for prime time! Reminiscent of HP products with 2 million bells and whistles poorly supported or implemented!Tech support is an absolute mess. Got a DOA unit. Chatted with support they said they would have someone from the Enterprise support contact me... they did a WEEK later. I had figured out the power came disconnected on the inside and fixed the problem myself. Later I had a stuck time machine backup that I had to delete. I had to ssh in to the box but had a problem finding the sparsebundle file to delete. Tech support took several days to get back to me with the WRONG instructions. I have 3 of these installed for clients... they are working well.... just not happy with the half-baked implementation.

I give 4 of 5 stars because I only use this NAS to backup videos and pictures. I don't connect to it from the WEB and it's used in house only. So to be fair I can't comment on all the features because I don't use it. For what I use it for it's a perfect fit for me. I owned an old Netgear NAS for about 5years prior to this one and that still has all of the original hdd's and no issues at all. Since I had great experience with that one I bought another Netgear and glad I did. This one is loaded with 6-3TB drives.

I've had a ReadyNAS 316 now for about a year and a half, using it as a disk-to-disk backup for about 8TB of data. Last week, I started receiving Bit Rot notification alerts indicating that errors could not be repaired. Shortly after, I started getting CHECKSUM and CHUNK errors in my backup databases, indicating corruption.My firmware is up to date and my NAS is protected by a good UPS.The ReadyNAS system logs say my drives are fine, and indicate no other hardware problems. After talking with support, they advise me that the only way to solve the problem is to backup the data and reformat the NAS. When I do this, what is to prevent the problem from re-occurring? Support did not have an answer to this question.Needless to say, I've lost confidence in the product and can't recommend it to others.