"OS6" - a question or three

Thanks for the reply with answers. Testing a demo on a VM isn't something I wanted to get into right now.

Basically, I'm having a dilemma: I have 3 Pro BE boxes. One is out of warranty, and the others are still within the 5 years (but will expire over the next 18 months or so.) Like a complete idiot, I actually believed the firmware release notes for the past 4 to 5 years stating that snapshot resizing would be re-enabled, so I've kept hoping that Netgear wasn't lying to me. Apparently, they were.

So, I'm evaluating what I'm going to do now. As they drop out of warranty, the boxes are much less useful to me. One of the primary reasons for spending the extra money on the BE boxes was the 5 year warranty. I always knew that if a p/s died or something, I'd get it repaired or replaced from netgear. As well, I could put the RAID sets into one of the other devices to extract the data. (Yes, I have backups, but its on extremely slow and inconvenient media.) Being that new ReadyNAS devices are using an incompatible OS, I can't even reliably purchase a new replacement box to drop the existing drives into without erasing everything.

Combining all this, I need to start planning for cycling these boxes out of use. That means either staying with netgear or moving to a different NAS product completely. Right now, I'm bitter that Netgear has abandoned the devices I still have (and are still under warranty) without re-enabling a feature that I purchased with the devices. In case I haven't made it obvious yet, I think my bitterness is mostly about Netgear promising to re-enable the feature for years, but it's been a lie. That has me leaning away from anything with a "netgear" brand on it.

On the other hand, these boxes have served me well over the past several years. I had one warranty "advanced replacement" without too much hassle (once I got past the script jockey when calling for tech support), and I had another die from a lightning strike on the building. (Happily, the 6 drive RAID inside was in perfect condition once I put the drives in another box.) That's a pretty good track record for me.

So, I'm trying to look past my bitterness and to evaluate what's different with "OS6" when compared to what I've been using. What will I lose and what will I gain. From what I can tell, I'll gain more flexibility in expanding the RAID and useful snapshots, but I'll lose dual redundancy and scheduled scrubs. (Or, I can retain dual redundancy, but lose some flexibility in expanding the RAID.) For me, the NAS is about FAST and RELIABLE data access across a gigabit network. Drives spinning down doesn't mean anything to me (I have it disabled on the Pro BE boxes.) As well, anything with the word "cloud" in it is actually a negative and would be disabled. Beyond the fluff, are there any other actual differences?

Even though I'm trying to get past my bitterness, I have to assume that any feature that doesn't exist TODAY will never exist no matter what promises are made, and that Netgear might even take a feature or two away from me. Netgear has proven that this is one of the "hidden costs" of doing business with them.

So, that's why I was hoping that someone could make it simple and describe "what's different."

(Please pardon me if the post is a bit long winded and repetitive.)

Gary