"OS6" - a question or three

garyd9 wrote:
I have to assume that any feature that doesn't exist TODAY will never exist no matter what promises are made

Personally I assume that on every purchase (no matter who the vendor is). I'll happily take improvements/new features if they show up, but I think its a huge mistake to anticipate them at purchase.

garyd9 wrote:
I think my bitterness is mostly about Netgear promising to re-enable the feature for years, but it's been a lie.

I do get that, and carrying the "we will reenable" message for years from one release to the next was a mistake on their part. It would have been better for them to simply admit that they couldn't fix it safely. I don't think they were betraying you, and I think they had good intentions to re-enable it back in the day, but I do see your point. I agree they've had no real plans to enable it for a while - they were just carrying forward an old release note without much thought. Though you did say in another post that you only would have needed it rarely, and managed ok without it. So I can't help but think you are over-reacting on this.

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.) 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?

Well, part of the answer is that you don't need to rush your purchases, since everything is running fine. So you can take another look in a few months, when 6.2 arrives. My warranty is up on the NV+ and duo (which back up some pro-6 shares), and I see no reason to take them out of service as long as they show no signs of distress.

I gave you the rest of my answer. You should get a more robust file system (which is admittedly hard to quantify). You get useful snapshots, file checksums, antivirus protection, file system compression, a newer kernel which can be updated with security patches without as much back-porting.

In 6.2 you should get some more things - if that's out when you need to buy, then take them into account. If not, then don't.

In any event, on your next buy you shouldn't be comparing OS4 to OS6. You should be comparing ReadyNAS with its competition. Fixating on OS4 is a mistake.