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1GB Memory for ReadyNAS NV - original Infrant model
I just recently bought one of these with 4 1tb HDD's, and while I was awaiting delivery saw this on ebay "Crucial CT12864X335.16FFY (1GB DDR PC2700 333MHz 200-pin SO DIMM) RAM Module" for just £18. ...
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):
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
Thanks for all that. we have both been on this forum since, well, before this forum was updated to its present form. and i think before you worked for netgear and were just a contributor that did spectatular (free) things for the community.
the thread was originally just for complementing the NV+ and for that i still agree; it lasted forever, way more than expected. and it is still working fine.
as for the other units, im sorry but i disagree.
my units came with 3gb and 4gb ram respectively. This was from a authorized seller using authorized netgear product, so they pass that test
as for the snapshot, try it yourself. i just did (i pulled the 6 drives, put in a spare, and defaulted it), and there is NO menu i can find to change it. Maybe i missed something, but after you select xraid2, thats it. In the OLDER firmware i agree it was an option, but i cant find it now.
if im wrong, tell me exactly how to do it and i will retract my statement. but that doesnt change the fact that originally, when purchased, the snapshot COULD be resized. but that WAS cripped in a future version, with the promise to be restored, but never was.
i understand the NVS and Pioneer units were underpowered, but you threw the baby out with the bathwater. MY units (pro business and pro 6) were not crippled in any way; they are both 64 bit systems with plenty of memory. So your argument that SOME units didnt have the hardware to support it to justify ALL units being abandoned seems, well, not a good argument.
anyway, im not interested in dragging this out, i liked netgear, still think the hardware is great, i just feel bad about the abandonment of hardware that WASNT very old at the time.
netgear in this case didnt meet my expectations.
Yes, I was an active user on the ReadyNAS Community for years before I became an employee.
If you had more than 1GB RAM that would've been a 3rd party upgrade, I think. If a reseller throws more RAM in a unit using 3rd party modules then there could be compatibility issues with that memory that we couldn't be expected to support. Some users would have found workloads that worked fine on 4.2.x with 1GB RAM may not have worked with the slightly increased memory usage from the newer OS. It is one of many factors that was considered.So you didn't see the option to choose the snapshot size in RAIDar when doing a factory default? If you were using RAIDar 6, please try again using RAIDar 4.3.8. When you click setup there is the option to choose X-RAID2 or Flex-RAID and the RAID mode. At that point it should be possible to set the snapshot space as the volume hasn't even been created yet so it shouldn't need to do any resizing to allocate more than 10GB.
Unfortunately we weren't able to safely re-enable the option to resize the snapshot on 4.2.x.
If you look at competitor products you will see users voicing the same concerns about models that are easily powerful enough to run a major upgrade not getting it because they are EOL. Unfortunately a line has to be drawn somewhere.i went back and looked at my receipts
the base unit came with 2GB at the time i purchased it; i think it was a special offer from netgear
and my unit was ordered with 4GB.
my online warranty registration from Netgear shows it came with 4GB, so this wasnt just a third party upgrade. Rather it was a Netgear authorized VAR who used Netgear authorized components and was fully authorized/warranted by Netgear.
On the netgear warranty site, once i entered the serial number it populated with the memory/cpu/disk drive serials. And it showed 4GB.
i still have copies of everything if there is a question about this. i know they went away from VARs, at least the ones i knew, later in time, but thats what they did when i purchased my units.
Which makes sense because VARs are how you typically sell to businesses that have different needs. The VARs use unpopulated units and configure them whatever way you want; the manufacturer then warranties the entire box. And mine, per the netgear warranty web page, included the 4GB of memory.
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