To Upgrade or Not, please offer opinions

[rharvey]

Hello Everyone - I have been a VERY long time user of the Unraid and have one of the original CoolerMaster towers fitted out with newer dense cages and currently a total or 18 drives and over 20TB in total storage.  Despite an occasional drive failure now and then the system has served me well.  I'm currently running 4.5.6 and have avoided the upgrade to the most current version of 4 only because it offered features or fixes that did not apply to my situation.

 

So my question for all the experts here is this, should I take the plunge and move to version 5 when it goes GA...?  I'm a really simply user with only unMenu as an add-on and no plans to add much, well maybe airplay but that's it.  What would I gain moving to 5 or what could I loose..? How difficult would this upgrade potentially be and are there any pitfalls such as drive compatibility I should consider..? The attached jpg should give you all an idea of the drives I running currently, there are some of the drives that needed the jumper in there and the jumpers are installed.

 

Many thanks for your thoughts....

[cassiusdrow]

I tend to be of the "if it isn't broke, don't fix it" mindset when it comes to my unRAID server.  I recently upgraded from 4.7 to 5.0rc8a for 3TB drive support.

 

The 4.x line still has a bug in the parity sync/drive rebuild process that could result in either incorrect parity or rebuilt drive data.  Version 4.7.1 was promised but never delivered.  There is an unofficial build here.  This bug was also fixed in 5.0beta8.  The bug can be avoided by not writing to the array during a parity sync or drive rebuild.

[maxinc]

With an array this large, I would be reluctant to upgrade, especially if I wouldn't need any of the features in v5 in particular. I would try it on a test machine first to familiarise myself with the new features and concepts before trying it on a huge array. But this is me getting anxious when talking about TB of data 

[WeeboTech]

Before you upgrade, do a parity check. I was on 4.5.6 for the longest time. When I upgraded to 4.7, the parity drive was being upgraded, One of the data drives went bad during the process. This in turn left me with an unusable parity drive and a data drive that had bad sectors. I could not rebuild the drive from unRAID. I had to use riplinux and ddrescue to copy the bad drive forward, then backward to a spare drive. I eventually retrieved all my data except for the 1 bad sector, yet the whole process left me shell shocked.  Especially knowing I do monthly parity checks.  In any case exercise the parity check first, then do the upgrade.

[NOX6]

I have been running 4.7 for the longest time and plan on keeping it. The hardware is old but running fine. I just purchased a NORCO 4220 and am building it out with ESXi. unRAID 5.0 is working great as a VM and I am able to now run other VMs easily. I plan on using 3TB drives for unRAID in the NORCO and will only migrate over the movies and tv. I plan on leaving the "real data" over on the original unRAID 4.7 since it has been so stable. To be able to use 3TB drives was the main hook for me in moving to version 5.  One other VM I have going on is Windows Server 2012 Essentials which is great for doing PC backups.

[rharvey]

I think you guys have convinced me to stay put for now.  My hardware is about 3 yeas old now (MB and Controllers) and the drives are between 0-6 years old.  It's all working great so I'm staying put.

 

Many Thanks Guys...