StellarJay

Thank you for the very detailed explanation, I really do appreciate it when people are very clear with their posts. I guess I should have introduced myself a little bit too though to maybe save you some of the hassle of having to over explain things. I'm an IT professional of more than two and a half decades working in everything from network engineering and SecOps to ICU board level repair/refurbishing to plugin and app development on numerous platforms and a whole bunch of other stuff in between. I'm quite familiar with current (and old school) raid technologies. I'm known for doing all kinds of funky DIY computer projects with hardware and software that were never designed for one another but it's a thrill for me when something ends up working out well. That being said there were a couple things I didn't know about in your post so TIL. I already knew that the RAM would be a bit of a sticking point for repurposing this hardware but I'm not overly concerned with speed as I am more focussed on reliability and security. If I can get the M.2 slot up and running I do have a 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD (MLC with a DRAM Cache) I can use in it so that may increase performance for my primary use case of serving up media through Plex but I also use it as a archival backup for my important files and the system drives of my PC's. However I may just end up doing all that on a new NAS setup for myself as I'm very interested in taking advantage of the "buddy swap" feature of HexOS. I have a friend who I've set up my own reverse proxy VPN for and I'm looking into getting him his own NAS finally setup so he can stop mooching off of my hardware for his backing up and I'll be able to setup an encrypted space on his NAS for me to store my offsite backup copy on so I can finally stop paying for cloud storage and if I can repurpose the RN424 I can just give that to him.

There's an open m.2 slot in the ReadyNAS 424 as well and I'm about 98% sure that it supports up to 4GB of DDR4 RAM (adding an additional 2GB to the open slot) and I believe it may support up to 8GB total (I'm about 60% sure on that though). DDR4 RAM is pretty easy for me to come up with. I'm just not liking the idea of decommissioning perfectly good usable hardware. PS. I can't read the txt file you uploaded as I think txt files are blocked.

I would like to throw my hat into the arena on wanting to try getting HexOS working on Netgear ReadyNAS hardware. I have ReadyNAS 424 that has been working great but since Netgear backed out of the NAS game a few year back the OS is dated and I am constantly worried about it not being a secure as it should be but I have it pretty isolated to only working on my local network for serving up Plex media, but I'd really like to updated to a more modern OS that I can be confident in using for my own person image cloud storage that I can access from anywhere, it doesn't need to be fast, just reliable and secure. Here's the specs of the 424: Processor Manufacturer: Intel Processor Type : Atom Processor Model : C3338 Processor Core : Dual-core (2 Core) Processor Speed : 1.50 GHz Memory Standard Memory: 2 GB Memory Technology: DDR4 SDRAM Network & Communication Ethernet Technology: Gigabit Ethernet I believe there is an additional DDR4 SDRAM slot which could be used to add up to 2GB additional RAM I believe, possibly could support up to 8GB ( 2 x 4GB). I've found a couple posts where some people have managed to figure out how to get the hardware to chain load Linux Alpine on a ReadyNAS 4 series, it would be awesome if HexOS could implement some relatively easy process to allow us to update and repurpose these abandoned ReadyNAS devices who's hardware should be capable of supporting at least a basic barebones setup. Here's a GitHub project link for the most promising one I found: RustyDust/readynas-alpine: Convert ReadyNAS systems to an Alpine Linux box while keeping data and services intact. Perhaps the HexOS devs could use it as a starting point to come up with something we could use. I plan on setting up a basic Desktop PC with HexOS on it to potentially replace the ReadyNAS if I'm not able to use HexOS on the ReadyNAS as a backup plan.