1GB Memory for ReadyNAS NV - original Infrant model

Thanks for the feedback.

I understand your frustration with the EOL. It is not a decision we took lightly. If you look at competitor products you will see similar disappointment expressed about decisions to EOL those. We are not alone in this.

The NV+ (v1) is essentially pretty much the same as a product we released back in 2006 and similar to models dating back to the earliest ones from 2004. We released 4.1.14 for these units in 2014. About 10 years of firmware updates is quite a long time.

The Pro Business was released back in 2008 and it continued to receive all the firmware updates for 4.2.x after it was discontinued and it wasn't feature crippled in any way. It runs the latest 4.2.x firmware 4.2.28 which we released in November 2015.

Whilst it's true that you can run OS6 on legacy 64-bit systems, here are a few examples of things we factored into our decision not to support running it on legacy hardware (there are many more):

1. There is no way to simply upgrade to OS6 leaving the data in place. You would need to backup your data first. Now everyone should backup data if they value it, but a lot of users don't, and if they ignored warnings before doing such an upgrade this may lead to data loss.
2. Even if we supported the upgrade we would still have needed to have provided some 4.2.x maintenance updates for these models for some time as not everyone is willing to take their system offline for long enough to do a factory reset and restore from backup in order to run a new OS. Considering the large number of 64-bit 4.2.x models this would have required a significant amount of resources.
3. Some 4.2.x models can't run OS6 (those with 32-bit CPUs. In the desktop line the NVX and NVX Pioneer had a 32-bit CPU, in rackmount the 2100v1 and the 1500). 
4. Legacy desktop ReadyNAS only have 1GB RAM. All our OS6 x86_64 hardware has at least 2GB RAM. We don't support 3rd party memory upgrades and whilst 1GB RAM should be enough users are more likely to find it isn't enough for them than with 2GB RAM.

For business class RAIDiator-x86 4.2.x systems the snapshot size can be set during RAIDar when doing a factory default (wipes all data, settings, everything). During the 10 minute countdown you can go into RAIDar, click setup and choose the snapshot size you want. What is disabled is the ability to resize it without needing to do a factory reset. The Online Filesystem Check uses a snapshot and you can use a snapshot for other purposes too.

If you write more to the NAS than the snapshot space then it will be automatically invalidated. So the key thing is to get your snapshot to exist at a time when minimal writes are being made to the NAS. If you are backing up lots of data to the NAS and trying to have a snapshot exist at the same time you are not using the snapshot feature how it is designed.

On OS6 snapshots are very different. You don't have a single snapshot and you don't have dedicated space for snapshots. With OS6 you can have an unlimited number of snapshots. The less space that is used by current data, the more space you have available for snapshots.

What some users have done is got a new OS6 NAS, used that as their primary and put OS6 on their legacy NAS (e.g. Pro Business Edition, Pro 6) and use that as a backup NAS.

We still have some Infrant guys here. It is quite a long while now since we bought Infrant. In just over a year it will be 10 years since the acquisition.