Ultra 4 Plus - Is it worth upgrading from 4.2.30 to OS 6.6

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StephenB wrote:

You can do the upgrade.  It requires a factory reset, so you'd lose all the data.  It's also useful to check the bios version first.

 

The benefit of course is that you'd get OS 6 on both systems.  That would enable ReadyDR backup for instance.  Plus it removes the expansion limits of OS 4. 

 

FWIW, my pro-6 is running 4.2.30.  When/if I need a factory reset anyway I'll upgrade it.  But for now I'm leaving it alone.

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No worries on the factory reset as there's nothing on my Ultra 4 Plus at the moment.  I'm uncertain how to check the bios. What version do I need?  Good points on the ReadyDR and expansion limits.  Yeah, part of me feels I should just leave it as-is since it meets my needs and part of me thinks if I'm going to do it then nows the time since nothing would be lost.  

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Rootax wrote:

I upgraded a Pro 4 with OS 6.X a while ago, and the best thing for me was the newer SMB version. If I remember correctly, at the time, 4.x versions were limited to SMB 1.5 or 2, don't remember exactly. With OS6, it was 3, and 3.1 now. It give a nice write speed boost on my  volume. 80mo/sec => 115 (limit of my gb link), because smb3 is easier on the cpu I guess.

 

 

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Unfortunately, I didn't see any change in write speed (80MB/s +) to my Ultra4 +.  However, prior to the upgrade I occasionally experience transfers stopping for 10-20 seconds on large files.  Sometimes it would resume and be fine and other times it would never resume but also reflected the whole file was on the Ultra4+.  The file essentially became corrupt since something was going wrong with the transfer process.  I would typically have to reboot/volume scan to fix the issue and then delete the file and re-transfer to get a clean copy onto the Ultra4+.  I have not experienced this since the factory default and OS upgrade to 6 and it was becoming more frequent.  I also checked the drives and none were having errors or any other issues.  To be fair, my Ultra4+ was probably long over due for a factory default since it's being running over 5 years through multiple OS upgrades, multiple volume expansions and 10s of terabytes transfers.  This was one of my reasons for upgrading to the 626 as I had fears the Ultra4+ might have been ready to give up the ghost.  But so far, it has been performing well and is still using the same exact drives prior to the OS6 upgrade.  Overall, I agree with others that it's worth the time to upgrade your older platforms to OS6.