As anybody reading this forum and the other one will have no doubt noticed, there appears to be an undeniable pattern emerging with successive NAS firmware revisions which fail to live up to expectation and almost appear to be getting progressively worse, at least over the past year or so that I'm aware of.
A quick read of the various threads and you notice these issues fall into several general categories..
- Failure to correct bugs listed in the release notes as 'fixed'.
- Failure to address longstanding issues of broken (non core) functionality.
- (Lately) A high probability of rendering the NAS useless, requiring the user to find their own workaround if they would like to see their data anytime soon. (this bug is reportedly still alive and well after three successive updates - unacceptable by any standard).
- Basic screwups in the implementation of login authentication code, allowing a large surface area for attack.
As well as one user who took a look at the V3.xx code and reported it to be bloated and amateurish, or words to that effect.
The cute slogan "Founded in 2004, Thecus brings decades of R&D expertise.." is somewhat misleading these days, since clearly more effort is being invested into marketing than R&D or beta testing.
Anyhow, those of us who purchased this hardware are now stuck with it for some time, and since we can be unreasonable about these sort of things when we're gambling with multiple terabytes of data, what possible OS alternatives are there? The hardware in these devices appears to be generic PC components - how viable would it be to dump the flaky Thecus firmware and substitute something like FreeNAS, or a storage-oriented Linux distribution?
How can we salvage some sort of reliability from this awful situation?