QUESTION: Would you flash your working NAS (no replies)

Hello!

I have a Netgear Stora still alive. This box a Marvell 88F6281 (1 GHz) with: 256 MiB Flash, 128 MB Ram, one USB 2.0 and 1 GbE and 2 sata ports, it's a NAS from 2010 that runs Linux 2.6.22.18-Netgear Axentra HipServ OS.

Now it's where it gets interesting...

The company Netgear is dropping the support and while the NAS will still work, they drop part of the functionality like remote access, plus if you reset the device you will not be able to initialize it again (and it happened to me by pressing the power button too long by accident). Also, the management web interface is based on adobe flash that is kind of deprecated too.

I just found a post in this forum to flash via u-boot and overwrite the custom Linux distribution installed on the NAS and install a minimal Debian stretch with Open Media Vault 4. I was wondering if to use your tutorial to install Debian Stretch and OpenMediaVault which seems appealing as I could use more functionality if I need to (cloud syncing, perhaps add an USB wifi adapter...)

I am a bit worried that

• I will brick the box during the process
• I am unsure if some of the features that I currently have like time machine or windows file history backups will work
• I would lose performance or OS funcionalities like scheduled wakeup / sleep of hard drives, fan control, led indicators...
• The hardware will fail anyway since it's 10 year old NAS even when I was not using it a lot.

I would like for advice before I get hands on ... what is the recomendation

Thank you in advance