Given that Netgear appears to be abandoning this product line, and given that even @WhoCares is giving up on it, I am going to consider alternative solutions to replace my aging 524X. I hope to hear ideas from the user community about alternative solutions now in 2023+.
There are obvious solutions such as switch to QNAP or Synology of course. There are also probably many solutions using one of the open source NAS solutions, but as I understand it will require me to obtain some kind of mini PC to run those on?
What has become more and more difficult over time with my ReadyNAS has been using a few addons such as Plex and Medusa. Eventually I had to move Medusa to a mac or pc at home. I'd much rather have one box that has the raid, runs the software and handles the basic file server needs, and hosting typical stuff like Plex and Medusa..without concerns of the fact that Netgear is not keeping the OS up with the times.
ReadyNAS is a basically compact PC. You can run whatever you like on it. The trick is to reach the video output and config BIOS to boot from an external device (often an USB stick). Or via serial, telnet, reach the internal flash, etc.
What you choose depends on your needs and how powerful your machine is.
The most popular choices for a replacement OS are:
Since Netgear has abandoned their storage products. They should take responsibility for their products and customers and write detailed guides how to access the hardware and boot up third party OS on each NAS model.
Preferable release of technical documents of the hardware. And also release all versions of ReadyNAS OS (and RAIDiator) as open source on Github or Gitlab.
Sure would be nice if they open sourced OS6 but I really doubt they will.
No doubt that if I am going to be able to run an alternative solution it will have to be something that can be run headless, like readynas os can.
I’m not too hopefully about trying to repurpose this hardware with a different OS unless someone like @WhoCares figures it all out. Far more likely I will just use it as is for as long as I can in some capacity a few more years and then buy something new but I’m not sure what right now.
According to @mdgm every ReadyNAS has a serial console port. So if your device doesn’t have HDMI, you will need to figure out how to connect to the serial interface.
@eton wrote: According to @mdgm every ReadyNAS has a serial console port. So if your device doesn’t have HDMI, you will need to figure out how to connect to the serial interface.
I think you are assuming that the ReadyNAS allows the bios to be configured through the serial port.
I'd like to test an alternative OS following some severe issues my Pro6 is having with OS6. Likely a HW fault but I want to explore the "OS bug" path.
My NAS has an intel 6600 and 8GB of RAM. I only use the NAS as file storage. I also run iDrive and I see it's not available for anything but the main brands. It's available for linux though? But I can find an alternative, that's not a deal breaker.
I am thinking of openmediavault - I looked into TrueNAS and it's got silly HW requirements.
Would anybody recommend anything else for my NAS? Would openmediavault support RAID expansion so I don't have to reset my whole RAID if and when I add or upgrade a drive?
Any indication on how to install using the internal USB storage? I can use an external one but if I could re-use the internal one, that would be great.
I think OpenMediaVault is a good choice. That it's also Debian based gives you a leg up on the learning curve. I think it also supports BTRFS (it's been a while since I looked at it). I'll likely switch to it if I abandon ReadyNAS OS. Doing the switch on our existing hardware is a lot easier for those of us with ReadyNAS that have, or can have installed, a monitor port.
