Rusty

Or block it via your firewall/router

That's 100Mbps for sure

I think you can boot off MicroSD, but I've never tried it as I have a horrible old USB stick to use.

No change in transfer speed after update for me.

Just make a new USB stick, they're only used to boot the machine, so no danger. The MAC/serial thing is to trick MyDS into working and not actually necessary to use the thing.

I skipped a bunch of that doing mine. Put new USB stick in currently running NAS, update, reboot, done.

Nope.

Just boot the new image and install.

I hear my discs spin up every so often, so I assume it works.

1. Never tried one, but pictures say yes. As for worth it, that depends on how many drives you want. 2. Dunno, I prefer RAID-5 3. Red's are most definitely a better option, but desktop drives will do the job, that's what I have in mine.

Just get the new boot image and go for it. Worry about the drives when they arrive.

Pretty sure that it's vulnerable to Heartbleed, so I would update.

1. There are four 3.5" bays and one spot for an optical or 2.5" drive 2. You use USB as a boot drive 3. Depends, direct play your only limited by the throughput of your network, transcoding it will do 1 x 1080p stream, two would be pushing it.

My Celeron shows as i3 as well, I assume that it's just a text string somewhere.

Yes to AHCI and although I didn't perform any updates, it was running the latest out of the box.

It's just the stock 2GB, no idea what brand but I'm going to assume HP. Can't remember what the drives are either if I'm honest. It's a hodgepodge of desktop drives; one is a Hitachi and one is a Samsung, one might be a Seagate but I'm not sure on that, the fourth could be anything. Edit: Or I could just screenshot the model numbers...

Use the setting in your BIOS?

I'm using RAID-5 and seeing good write speeds over SMB:

I'm using RAID-5 and am getting good speeds over SMB:

Had you installed 5.1 then done an update? I remember that it was expected behaviour for the first update to cause that and need a reboot.

Er, I think so... I don't sit and listen to it to be honest

Well the downside (IMO) is that it's meant to be rack mounted, so is pretty long and wide.

Sick Beard?

My Gen8 is bare metal, but my drives are AHCI and DSM takes care of the RAID-5.

Results from my Celeron G8: