I have been a pro user for several years and currently run 4.7 to host my media in my study that I link through from PC running XBMC in my living room.  Long term goal are to start up a second PC in the play room to also run XBMC with linked libraries.  I also want to set up a PVR that can hook up to the XBMC PCs to run live TV.  Ultimately I'd like to only leave one box on 24/7 and I have been reading about Xen and unraid.

 

So now my question.  Should I go ahead and upgrade to 5 or wait for the stable 6 release and upgrade then as I think I need 6 to run Xen?  Although I am not sure as I am just learning about xen as well.

My opinion fwiw. IF you have a full backup of your server, I'd just wait for 6.0 to go final, and move directly to it with an entirely fresh configuration. Take screen shots of EVERY page in the 4.7 webgui, and use those screens to recreate your settings in the new install. If you are running without backups, I'd be a lot more cautious.

 

Do you perform regular parity checks?

 

Do you have any add on programs currently, or are you running just stock unraid?

 

Do you keep up with your drives health by checking on smart status occasionally?

 

Do you plan on updating your motherboard / cpu / memory /hba?

 

Every time you start making changes to a running system, you risk mucking something up and losing data. Since you are currently on 4.7, the largest array drive you could have is 2TB. Have you considered getting another license for $30 and just building a new system from scratch? With the current drive sizes of 4+ TB, you could possibly be better off leaving your old array alone as a backup server, and starting fresh with new, more virtualization friendly hardware.

 

If you post your current system details, like motherboard, cpu, memory, hba, network card, hard drive sizes and percent used, etc, we could make better suggestions.