RN424 Replacement: need advice

Netgear has taken the coward's route and not said anything official about EoL'ing the ReadyNAS line. But the writing has been on the wall for a good three years.

There is, unfortunately, no clear or sanctioned migration path beyond the current (and now aging) ReadyNAS models and their OS. Some forum members had expressed hope that Netgear would open source the OS or unlock the BIOS to give owners the very hack-y option of upgrading to a different OS, but both of those solutions look highly unlikely.

Synology and QNAP both make off-the-shelf NAS solutions that might be worth looking into, but they can be pricey.

My replacement for my ReadyNAS 626 will be a homebuilt unit. I'm eyeing a 13th gen Intel i5 with a workstation/server motherboard from Asus or SuperMicro to run TrueNAS. But from what little I've been able to understand of the ZFS filesystem that TrueNAS uses, it's much more finicky and far less flexible than Btrfs.

That's probably not the answer you wanted to hear, but I'm afraid that's where things are at.