"OS6" - a question or three

garyd9 wrote:
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.

It's possible it could be re-enabled, but you'd need to be really good at doing a defrag. Shrinking a filesystem isn't very safe. You can backup your data, do a factory default, chose a different snapshot space allocation in RAIDar and confirm your choice. So you aren't stuck with the one snapshot space size forever.

I had conversations with NETGEAR over the years before I joined where they stated that they were aiming to re-enable it in different releases, but obviously they never were able to get it re-enabled safely.

garyd9 wrote:
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.

You can put the drives into one of your other Pro BEs or if you don't have one any more you can move your disks into e.g. a 316 or 516.

Optional steps:
1. Put a spare (must not be from your array) disk into the 316 or 516
2. Update the firmware to latest
3. Verify firmware update was successful
4. Power down and remove spare disk

Steps:
1. Move disks across from Pro BE to 316/516
2. Power on doing a NORMAL boot.
3. Login to NAS and copy off all data
4. Factory default (wipes all data, settings, everything)
5. Restore data from backup

If this doesn't work support can help you recover your data. They have a low-level diagnostic mode they can use to help you copy off your data (assuming the array is fine, if there is a problem with the RAID array then a data recovery contract may be required).

If your Pro BEs are still working I'd still use at least some of them for backup duties if you get a new NAS if I were you.

garyd9 wrote:
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.)

I use dual-redundancy.

What I did:
1. Do a factory default
2. Disable X-RAID
3. Delete the volume
4. Create a new RAID-6 volume with the same name 'data'
5. Re-enable X-RAID
6. Create the default shares manually

You can click a button to start a scrub on OS6 whereas on 4.2.x you could do them on a schedule. It would be nice to have both options on OS6.

You can also click a button to start a defrag on OS6.

garyd9 wrote:
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?

The 516 is much faster with a dual-core Ivy Bridge CPU. So if you want fast, the 516 is a step up again.

garyd9 wrote:
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.

When the snapshot size resizing feature was taken away it was taken away at the same time as significant new features were added e.g. 64-bit kernel, initial support for EXT4 and more.

Features are never removed lightly. We don't remove features unless absolutely necessary.

I would also add that support for 3TB+ capacity drives was added in 4.2.16. This was a major change that required lots of development work and testing to make sure it worked smoothly no matter which previous version of RAIDiator you last did a factory default on. There's also support for 4k sector partition aligned drives which came in 4.2.12.