Migrating from UnRAID 4.7 to 6.8

[davephan]

I would am using UnRAID 4.7 and would like to migrate to UnRAID 6.8.  When I bought UnRAID version 4.7, up to 20 data drives, cache, and parity drive man years ago, it included two USB flash drives. Is it possible to modify my second UnRAID 4.7 flash drive to version 6.8, and then simply power down the unRAID server and swap out the UnRAID 4.7 flash drive with the UnRAID 6.8 flash drive? Or, does the UnRAID version 4.7 to version 6.8 migration require more steps? 

 

I've also considered replacing my 6 year old system board, CPU, and memory. I have nine 2 TB data drives and one 2 TB parity drive. 

[aethyr]

I'm in a similar situation, so I'm interested in the responses. Does 6.8 fix transfer speed issues? My 4.5.4 transfers below 1MB/sec and often slower than that and constantly times out for large files, but I've just sort of accepted it as the cost of doing business. Hoping 6.X is much better.

[JorgeB]

See here:

https://wiki.unraid.net/Upgrading_to_UnRAID_v6

[Frank1940]

Here are the hardware requirements:

 

I would recommend at least 4GB of RAM.  Some folks have had problems updating from one version to the next version with only 2GB of RAM.  (Updates now happen much quicker because of security patches required for those using VM's and Dockers.)  

[Frank1940]

12 hours ago, aethyr said:

I'm in a similar situation, so I'm interested in the responses. Does 6.8 fix transfer speed issues? My 4.5.4 transfers below 1MB/sec and often slower than that and constantly times out for large files, but I've just sort of accepted it as the cost of doing business. Hoping 6.X is much better.

This can be caused by the RFS file system used with 4.7 if the drives are nearly full.  Sorry but there is no fix for this problem except to convert to another file system.  (Basically, the fix is copy the data from one of the RFS drives to a new drive with one of the new formats.  Format that old RFS drive to a new format and repeat with the next RFS drive.)

[aethyr]

On 3/29/2020 at 5:56 AM, Frank1940 said:

This can be caused by the RFS file system used with 4.7 if the drives are nearly full.  Sorry but there is no fix for this problem except to convert to another file system.  (Basically, the fix is copy the data from one of the RFS drives to a new drive with one of the new formats.  Format that old RFS drive to a new format and repeat with the next RFS drive.)

I was thinking of just copying all my unraid data to a different drive somewhere and just installing from scratch to the latest version. My hardware is pretty old, can I assume if 4.5 supported my hardware that the latest will also support it? Or do you recommend that I upgrade HW as well? I was assuming that CPU speed and memory wasn't a huge factor in performance, but maybe now it is?

 

EDIT: I see that the latest requires a 64 bit CPU. I don't know even remember if its a 64 bit CPU. I think I'll just get new hardware. 

 

Hmm, it looks like the HW compatibility list is old. Is there a link to recommended HW or does pretty much anything work now?

Edited March 31, 2020 by aethyr

[Frank1940]

Pretty much anything works.  Just stick with the better known names and recent hardware.  (Exception is the recommended LSI SAS/SATA cards)  If you are looking at running a VM, be sure to read the VM sections in both the update guide and the manual for the current version 6.   Hardware is bit more restrictive depending on how close you want to get to the 'bare metal' experience.

[aethyr]

Thanks. I plan on the following build, can you do a quick look over and see if there's anything wrong? Is there anything holding me back in terms of read/write performance?

 

Motherboard - ASUS Prime H310M-E R2.0 (built in Realtek® RTL8111H, 1 x Gigabit LAN)

CPU - Intel Core i3-9100F

Memory - 8GB CORSAIR Vengeance LPX 8GB DDR 2600

Hard drives - 2x Seagate BarraCuda 2TB (SATA6GB, 7.2krpm, 256MB cache)

 

I recall the old unRaid had issues with certain LAN cards and hard drives. Not sure if that's still the case?

 

[Frank1940]

The Realtek should be fine. 

 

IF you want max write performance, you should be looking at bigger 7200rpm drives.  (Higher bit density means faster read/write speed.)   Again, avoid shingled drives for max write performance.  Shingled drives are common with drives  of 8TB or larger but there may be a few 6TB shingled drives.  Many folks look for the 'sweet spot' by calculating the cost-per-TB.

[aethyr]

Ok, I changed my drives to 4TB WD Red Pro and placed the orders. Thanks for your help, much appreciated!