Massive Hardware/OS upgrade questions

[cheapskate]

I've been a bit remiss with updating and am still running version 4.5.7.  I'm also running out of storage space and need to add a 7th HDD to my array.  I can, of course, just add a drive and be done, but I'm growing concerned that the hardware is almost all 7 or more years old now and am thinking it's probably time to upgrade that too.  To do this and keep prices down, I'm considering buying a new motherboard and 64-bit cpu (and if necessary, ram) and then reusing all my other current hardware (powersupply, discs, cables, etc).  Once rebuilt I can slowly replace my aging 2 TB drives with new, much larger ones, solving the aging hardware, running out of space, and ancient OS problems relatively inexpensively.  Before I do any of this though, I have a few questions that I'm hoping will be answered here.

 

1. I have not been able to find instructions on the site for upgrading from 4.5.7 to current, can that be done or will I need to do incremental upgrades to get there (also, if anyone has a link to the correct doc, that would be awesome)?
2. I'm worried that upgrading the hardware could mess up the storage.  Do I just need to say the disc 1 is SNx and disc 2 is SNy etc and things will just work again?  The concern of course is that I will lose the data on the drives, and I want to be sure that doesn't happen.
3. The final part of the proposed plan is to gradually replace the old drives with new large ones.  Would I be able to copy data from the drive that I'm retiring to the new one to speed things up, or would the "transfer" be done via a rebuild of the array after putting the new drive in (as if the old drive failed).

 

Thanks for the input, I'm going to have to do something in the nearish future (probably right after Christmas), and want to have a solid plan in place before I start.

[John_M]

1. I know nothing about unRAID version 4 and only a little about version 5 so I don't know whether there's an upgrade path, as such.
2. However, Unraid 6 still supports ReiserFS so at the very least I would expect you to be able to make a note of which physical disk (by its serial number) is allocated to which slot and which is parity and then manually allocate the disks in the new server.
3. Replacing a disk with a bigger one is still done by rebuilding it but you'll probably want to make use of the more modern XFS file system on your new disks. In that case you would add a new disk to the array, then copy the contents of one or more of your existing disks to it before retiring the old ones.

I have no idea what features version 4 offered (did it support user shares?) but Unraid has come a long way even since the early days of version 6. Maybe someone who actually remembers using version 4 will comment.

[JorgeB]

Upgrading any version prior to v5beta6 needs a clean install, you can find the instructions here:

https://wiki.unraid.net/Upgrading_to_UnRAID_v6