the term beta usually scares me, so when I decided it was time to upgrade from 4.7 I went with 5.0.6.  I'm not a power user or anything, just mainly want a nice NAS.  We I bought a couple of hard drives and wasn't aware that 5 limits me to 7 drives with a plus key where v6 lets me have 8.  I have 8 drives right now and one of them I would like to keep as a hot spare (for now).

 

I have fairly low end hardware in my system.  an amd semperon processor:  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103698

and 2G of memory.

 

I don't use much other than unmenu now...should I just stick with the tried and true and unplug my 8th drive, or switch to 6?

 

thanks in advance,

Luke

For you, I don't know about switching over to v6 but you should at least try booting it to ensure all your existing hardware is still supported. You wouldn't want to find out that when v6 Final hits that it doesn't support your hardware. At that point it's too late for LT to make serious adjustments if needed, and you'd be stuck running v5 until your hardware becomes supported.

 

Granted, it's very low probability of hardware going unsupported, but it has been known to happen and it's substantially easier to fix during the beta series than the Final series.

good idea.  I suppose I could just try any old usb stick and leave my current thumb drive the way it is and try it.

...  just mainly want a nice NAS. 

 

If your system is working well and does everything you want I'd agree that simply leaving well enough alone is a good idea ... at least until you decide to upgrade your hardware and perhaps add some additional functionality to the server via the Dockers and/or VM's.

 

There's a VERY simple way to use your additional drive that doesn't require changing anything -- just upgrade your key to Pro      Then all you'd have to do is copy the new key to the flash drive and reboot.

 

... Not free [Costs $59] -- but certainly hassle free 

 

v6 has been in beta for quite some time. I would never run the first 1-5 beta releases as Im not great with linux and dont want to debug. But at this point, its as stable as a release candidate as far as Ive experienced.

 

I was accidentally on a beta version of v5 unraid for about 3 years because everything just worked great and I never remembered to update. I had 180 days of uptime without reboot and zero server maintenance.

 

If you have the time to tinker a little (just to setup the initial config and get used to the new layout and settings), i think its definitely worth the update. The dockers and 'apps' work great. Cache drives are a great addition (i think they werent available in v4). the entire system is much more smooth and polished.

 

also keep in mind that your hot spares dont count towards the drive limits. you can have 1000 hot spares if your hardware can support it. the drive limit only counts towards mounted drives (storage + cache + parity drives).

 

My array is 8 disks, but a mix of old small hard drives and a few newer 1tb and 2tb drives. so, rather than increase my drive count (bc then id need a new sata card and a 5in3 bay and a pro license), Im upgrading my 400 and 500gb drives to bigger drives (3 and 4tb). While the power to run 1 drive is minimal, less drives is less power demands, less heat, and all hard drives will fail eventually, so for me, its a good idea to retire the 9 year old hard drives before they go.

You might also consider support. If you are on the latest stable you are likely to get good support.

 

Some people are still running 4.7 or older. I would hesitate to support them myself since I have not used that version for a few years now.

 

If you are going to use a beta, you will get better support if you keep up-to-date with the betas.

Although the "zero risk" approach is to simply upgrade to Pro (which requires nothing more than copying the Pro key to your flash drive), it's also true that there's very little risk in upgrading to the latest v6 Beta.  If you decide that's what you want to do, you should simply do this:

 

(a)  Run a parity check to confirm you don't have any current parity issues.    If any corrections are made, then repeat it until you get zero sync errors.

 

(b)  Copy the entire contents of your flash drive to a backup folder on your PC [so you can easily revert to v5 if anything goes awry]

 

©  Uninstall UnMenu [Just delete the folder on your flash drive and remove it from the GO script]

 

(d)  Copy the files bzroot and bzimage from the latest v6 Beta to your flash drive.

 

(e)  Boot ... and then Start the array.    IMPORTANT NOTE:  If there are ANY errors indicated (e.g. an "unformatted" disk) do NOT Start the array ... post here with the exact errors you're seeing.

 

 

Although the "zero risk" approach is to simply upgrade to Pro (which requires nothing more than copying the Pro key to your flash drive), it's also true that there's very little risk in upgrading to the latest v6 Beta.  If you decide that's what you want to do, you should simply do this:

 

(a)  Run a parity check to confirm you don't have any current parity issues.    If any corrections are made, then repeat it until you get zero sync errors.

 

(b)  Copy the entire contents of your flash drive to a backup folder on your PC [so you can easily revert to v5 if anything goes awry]

 

©  Uninstall UnMenu [Just delete the folder on your flash drive and remove it from the GO script]

 

(d)  Copy the files bzroot and bzimage from the latest v6 Beta to your flash drive.

 

(e)  Boot ... and then Start the array.    IMPORTANT NOTE:  If there are ANY errors indicated (e.g. an "unformatted" disk) do NOT Start the array ... post here with the exact errors you're seeing.

unRAID auto-installs anything from /boot/extra, /boot/plugins, /boot/config/plugins when it boots. Anything in any of those folders that works with 32bit v5 will probably not work with 64bit v6. So those folders should also be deleted.

Agree => didn't mentioned those since the OP indicated all he was using was UnMenu ... but he may indeed have some older plugins he's just not currently using.