Have been using unraid since 2012, my original box hp micro server still runs 5.0-rc8a never had a problem other than blowing a drive, which was simply replaced and rebuilt from the parity.

 

Is it time to upgrade? is it worth upgrading is V6 very stable?

 

I have thrown together a temporary second server to act as a backup (pic attached) while I carry out the upgrade but starting to second guess myself "If its not broken don't fix it"  should I just leave my 5.0-rc8a alone?

 

should the 3 year old hp server be replaced?  (no offers yet but am sure something will pop up in 2016)

 

You should at least be running the current stable 5. release and not a release candidate.

 

Most of the frequent forum users are probably going to be able to support 6 better since that is what they are using. And there are a lot of new features that actually make 6 a much better NAS than 5 ever was, so even if you don't care about all the fancy support for addon applications like VMs and dockers it is worth upgrading. UPS support builtin, email builtin for notifications of status or problems, much improved UI.

 

Do you use any addons like unMenu or any plugins?

J

Do you use any addons like unMenu or any plugins?

 

Just unmenu, am thinking a clean install reformatting the hard drives would be the best way forward start from scratch as it where.

 

J

Do you use any addons like unMenu or any plugins?

 

Just unmenu, am thinking a clean install reformatting the hard drives would be the best way forward start from scratch as it where.

Absolutely no reason to reformat the hard drives. A clean install of the flash drive is probably a good idea though. Just take a screenshot so you know how to reassign your drives. If you accidentally assign a data drive to the parity slot it will get overwritten with parity.

will let the backup finish and give it ago will probably be boxing day now several TB to backup.

well the backup finally finished after several days, and the upgrade to v6.1.6 took a whole 5 minutes just running a parity check but all is looking good.