Seems that the readynas product line goes the same route as Logitech's squeezeboxes and harmony remotes... Everything comes to an end (especially after a management buy out) :cry:
Building and maintaining a community requires engagement. When people sense they're part of a vibrant community their enthusiasm is bolstered and often they reinforce their own engagement. When engagement falters and people lose that sense of involvement, enthusiasm suffers. Most people, when polled about their consumer electronics, don't reall register much of a sense of excitement. "I bought it and it performs it's function." But when that product comes with engagement between owners and developers, you get a quite different response. "Come see the cool new thing I learned my widget today!!"
You actually see this happening in the iPhone community. While there is a strong developer presence, the feeling of newness and novelty has tarnished. Excitement and engagement of the type I refer can be found in the jailbreak community. And these people often don't even know each other. It's about the shared sense that new and great things are happening, and that there is a healthy consumption of apps and of the desires of users by developers. And how ironic it is, then, that Apple wants to stomp out this community under the presumption that all this activity would move to the App Store if the jailbreak wasn't there. No, it wouldn't. Because the feeling of community is gone.
A website or bulletin board doesn't make a community. That requires /actual/ engagement between people. 🙂
Netgears silence will do nothing more than damage the relationship with its customer base. if taking the readynas line to end of life is there intention then they should make an official announcement.
Netgears silence will do nothing more than damage the relationship with its customer base. if taking the readynas line to end of life is there intention then they should make an official announcement.
Netgears silence will do nothing more than damage the relationship with its customer base. if taking the readynas line to end of life is there intention then they should make an official announcement.
The 'hint' is that Netgear has been asked directly (over the phone and through emails to Netgear staff) and indirectly (through this forum) to respond to several serious issues and to date we (the users) have not received a valid response, 'hinting' Netgear does not value the prosumer base it once supported. Given bugs that were introduced with 4.2.22 it would seem many seasoned users are less interested in testing a beta as there exists a very real fear the beta hasn't been adequately QC'ed internally.
As an example please consider the recent issues NVX users (myself included) have experienced involving the NVX EXT4 filesystem becoming corrupted by the tools in the firmware that expand XRAID2 under 4.2.22. Many users opened threads and cases and the forum collectively waited for someone from Netgear to OFFICIALLY comment on the issue. It would have been reassuring to hear from Netgear that the matter was being addressed in a future firmware release - but in the meantime provide instructions to users affected by the bad code to safeguard their data. None of that happened. At least one user mentioned moving to another vendor due to this lack of response.
This forum is not my job but I see enough to know Netgear has problems. I would suspect the Jedi currently employed by Netgear are aware of this yet none will address this prevailing sense of trepidation and uneasiness that surrounds the forum and the recent issues the ReadyNAS line has experienced.
I have relatively few questions left for Netgear, they have the right to ignore us and we have the right to take our business elsewhere but I would like to know why the Jedi will no longer defend the ReadyNAS line?
On the FaceBook account, there's a partial answer from netgear...
"As for v5 on x86 or other specific roadmap features. This is not the appropriate place to discuss. But there are lot of new exiting products and features in development. We are looking forward to the day we can share specific news."
I was already leaning toward buying another brand NAS instead of expanding my RNPro, reading the new threads in the forum cements that decision.
It seems what's happening here mirrors very closely what Logitech did to Slim Devices/SqueezeBox and Harmony. It's always going to be an issue when a purchaser doesn't inherently understand what makes their acquisition so valuable in the first place. At least it's not as bad as Google, those guys kill at least one great company/technology every month.
My next NAS will certainly not be a Netgear anymore. I still have a ReadyNAS Pro 6 and previously had an NVX. QNAP seems to be the way to go
QNAP? I'm thinking of Synology at the moment. Whats your take on it?
Its a pity as I used 2x Pro6, 1xNVX and 1xUltra6 in the past. All have not given me any major problems and are very reliable. However, the lack of activity and support in fixing bugs is of grave concern.
I bought a Synology DS213+ to replace a Duo becaus 1) Duo is EOL'd and 2) I wanted to see this GUI web admin everyone raves about. Quickly;
Pros Good performance, awesome interface, good management tools (Synology Asssistant), good plug-in/package library.
Cons All plastic case and trays (makes you appreciate the metal construction of the Duo), the big one - backup jobs are 'restrictive' - I cannot set up a job to 'pull' data from another source (like you can on the ReadyNAS). I didn't realize most NAS vendors focus on backing up what is on the NAS to somewhere else, not pulling in data from other sources to back up to the NAS. Yes, I can simply set up a job on another system to manage the backup but it is very convenient to set it up on the NAS and forget about it. This is actually a deal breaker for this unit in this situation.
Otherwise, I may grab a QNAP but I'll be verifying backup capabilities first.
At this point I'm fine with abandoning 4.x if they would just port 5.x to x86. My fear is the answer will be neither. Most likely either the Pro series dies a slow death or it gets an ARM update. Either way x86 gets nothing.
