Netgear, waer bestu bleven

June 13, 2026

Elegy

Forgive me the abuse of the title of a medieval Middle Dutch song that I remember from secondary school. It is a song about the death of a friend, called Egidius (Egidius, waer bestu bleven; in English: Egidius, where have you gone). Below is an elegy to a technological friend of mine, that is no more.

Around 2021, Netgear quietly exited the storage business. I regretted that, because they made decent products at an affordable price. I had a netgear ReadyNAS 102 running as of 2015 in a RAID 1 configuration. I liked it. Netgear made sturdy, good quality products running an accessible OS (a debian variant). I specifically selected it for that. Netgear bailing out meant: no more updates, no longer having access to a package repository. As of that day, my device was running on a deserted island and was slowly becoming a security risk.

A phoenix...

Therefore, a month ago, I decided to give it a second life. The plan was to rip out the Marvel Armada board and to replace it with a Raspberry pi 5 I had lingering around. That would be overkill in compute power, but it would allow me to run other services on the NAS, which I tried on the NAS before, but given the limited amount of compute power and RAM, it was of little success. Given the fact that I am a Linux tinkerer, I decided not to go for a dedicated NAS OS, but to install a plain vanilla raspbian and set up the device as a samba server.

...or a sloth?

Getting my data off of the old NAS onto the SSD of the pi 5 was a patience stressing task. Running an rsync from the device turned out to be a bad idea. Reading the files from smb, calculating the hashes, performing some compression and taking care of the networking was simply too much for the Marvel armada. It resulted in a 1MB/s transfer speed. It took me a while to diagnose the problem. Setting up the rsync from my main computer was the solution, getting me up to 40MB/s. Copying my 1TB of data took me about a day.

Claustrophobia

The gist of the idea was fine, but I ran into the problem anyone runs into when trying to upgrade old devices with COTS components: space. Where the Marvel board with some expansion PCBs was fitting snugly in the device, my pi 5 with an SSD hat and a bunch of cables to attach the disks to USB, consumed way more space than I anticipated. Result: I had to give up one of the drives. Its bay space is now consumed by a 22pin SATA angled expansion cable, and a powered SATA to USB converter. I also built in a PWM fan controller and replaced the fan with a Noctua fan to make sure the NAS stays cool yet quiet.

God in France

As I had to wait a few weeks for deliveries from different vendors, may NAS was sitting on my desk, with the side panels removed and it guts exposed for everyone to observe. It was a sorrow sight. However, today, I put it all together and 'Hooray, it works!'. I use the SSD for storing my files. I backup the SSD on the hard-drive and in the cloud (using a simple rsync). Speeds are fine (about 60MB/s performance on the 3.5" HD and about 800MB/s performance on the SSD). The fan of pi almost never spins up in normal NAS operation. The Noctua fan runs at 20% of its speed an only spins up very rarely. It runs quiet like mice. I still need to observe the unit when temperatures will go up in July, but my guess is that I will still be feeling like God in France.

If you want some details about the components/suppliers I used, feel free to contact me.