I've built a NAS and purchased an Unraid activation key. As Unraid 7 now has a release candidate would it be recommended to use the activation key for Unraid 7.0.0-rc.1 or stick with 6.12.14? Could I start a 30 day trial on 6.12.14 and then later install the 7.0.0 release on the same USB stick to use my activation key?

1 hour ago, LeopoldSmythe said:

I've built a NAS and purchased an Unraid activation key. As Unraid 7 now has a release candidate would it be recommended to use the activation key for Unraid 7.0.0-rc.1 or stick with 6.12.14? Could I start a 30 day trial on 6.12.14 and then later install the 7.0.0 release on the same USB stick to use my activation key?

You can use the activation key with either release.    I would think that as you seem to be starting fresh you might as well start with Unraid 7 to take advantage of its extra functionality.  
 

In the worst case once you have used the activation key and obtained an Unraid licence file that can then be used with either release if you want to try out the other one.

i've been recommending some peps to go to 7. If you want a stable system go 6.12.14

it comes down to how you want to interact with it and what you want it to do.

The reason I recommend it is due to the unraid ability to ditch the array and go zfs only. This depends on hard drive steps. See info in my spoilers and signatures

I’d go unraid 7 personally. 

Yes I think it makes sense to start with 7.0.0-rc.1. But I'm new to Unraid and I wondered about some other potential issues compared to 6.12:

• I have installed a 250GB SSD which I intend to use as a download cache to try to make the most of my 1Gbit fibre connection. Am I right in thinking that a full ZFS setup would not be able to use that, as it only caches in RAM? Then again I think the cache is not on the filesystem level and relies on a scheduled task to move data from the cache to the array? I'm probably not going to have a parity disk for the array or the cache as I won't be storing important data initially. I may add one later.
• Could there be compatibility issues with some community apps on 7? I intend to run Jellyfin, but as these are just Docker containers I don't expect any issues. I assume there is a bump in the Docker engine version but I've not been able to find the details on that in the release notes.

41 minutes ago, LeopoldSmythe said:

Yes I think it makes sense to start with 7.0.0-rc.1. But I'm new to Unraid and I wondered about some other potential issues compared to 6.12:

• I have installed a 250GB SSD which I intend to use as a download cache to try to make the most of my 1Gbit fibre connection. Am I right in thinking that a full ZFS setup would not be able to use that, as it only caches in RAM? Then again I think the cache is not on the filesystem level and relies on a scheduled task to move data from the cache to the array? I'm probably not going to have a parity disk for the array or the cache as I won't be storing important data initially. I may add one later.
• Could there be compatibility issues with some community apps on 7? I intend to run Jellyfin, but as these are just Docker containers I don't expect any issues. I assume there is a bump in the Docker engine version but I've not been able to find the details on that in the release notes.

 

The most beginner mistake is that unraid's "cache" pool has nothing to do with caching in a traditional sense. It's just a storage pool outside of the unraid array that you typically write data to before it gets "moved" to the array via the mover system. However when setup the idea is that when you send data to unraid, you don't have to think about it, it will just automatically go to the SSD cache pool, then later the system will move that data to the storage array.

 

1. If you're using it for a download drive, the filesystem on it really won't matter. For a single drive in a pool by itself, you can go with any of them, xfs, zfs, btrfs.

 

2. Not really. There are some plugins that have been integrated into the OS in Unraid 7 which if you downgraded you would need to install them on 6.12. Dockers are 100% not dependent on unraid OS.

 

IMO the only differences between 6.12 and 7.0 is the intel gpu driver support and running the OS without an array configured. 99% of the rest of the OS are the same features and 7.0 is quite stable. Any issues you'd have with 7.0 you're probably going to have on 6.12.

Edited December 12, 20241 yr by MowMdown