"OS6" - a question or three

garyd9 wrote:
"If you want to protect your data against the failure of two disks, you must switch to Flex-RAID and select RAID 6." Is this true and accurate?

Yes. Though switching to flex-raid doesn't require a factory reset (unlike OS4).

garyd9 wrote:

Second, a more general question: There doesn't seem to be a post or document that simply describes what has changed between the version 4 software and the new OS6 software. I've seen a couple of threads where people have tried to ask this, but they seem to go unanswered (besides people mentioning that ext3/4 limits are removed with btrfs, and that btrfs supports all kinds of wonderful things that isn't actually supported in the netgear product such as self-healing.) So, skipping all the marketing hype or netgear add-on stuff such as clouds, genies, and purple smoke in lamps, what does OS6 offer a person or business over the RAIDiator 4 firmware? Please don't include anything that doesn't already exist. (Promises for things that might happen in the future are great, but if they don't ALREADY exist, I have to assume the promises are as empty as the raidiator 4 promise of putting back snapshot resizing.)

xeltros made an excellent suggestion - it is worthwhile to test drive the GUI.

I use OS4 on my pro-6 (and an NV+ v1 and duo v1), and OS6 on an RN102 which I use for backup.

The OS6 GUI is more modern than the OS4 GUI - though frankly that doesn't matter that much to me.

Operationally, OS6 has AntiVirus protection, and snapshots that actually do something useful for me. The kernel is much newer, which has advantages if you want to load your own packages, and is possibly good for security.

BTRFS is designed to be more robust than ext4, so it is less likely to get corrupted due to unexpected power loss, etc - but that is not something I am inclined to test. I can understand why you might be skeptical about that (though the robustness isn't really about the self-healing stuff).

BTRFS built-in file checksums are nice, even if there is no magic healing. Today I create SFV files in every media folder directory I have (some thousands) so I can verify files. I wouldn't need that if all my file systems had the checksums.

OS6 is missing a couple of features I have on the pro-6 - for instance, I can send a WoL packet to a MAC address in an OS4 backup job, but I can't do that with OS6. Disk Spin down isn't there yet (which I suspect you've already seen). I can't schedule scrubs or file system checks yet. The GUI won't let me reset file owner/group and permissions the way I want to reset them. I use all those features, and would miss them if I switched to OS6.

Is it worth switching to OS6 on a functional PRO running OS4? In my opinion its not (and I haven't). Though others here obviously do (and have). What might change my mind about switching on my Pro ? Some more features, and not losing Netgear support.

Am I happy overall with OS6? Yes. It's been stable, and I think it will work out well as the going forward platform. Having one platform that runs on both ARM and x86 is good for users, not just for Netgear.