New F4-424 Pro

[docchris]

My new 4 bay 424-Pro arrives tomorrow. Should I set it up immediately with TOS 5, or should I wait for a beta of TOS 6?

What I mean is, will there be any advantage to an array that has been initialised by TOS 6 , compared with TOS 5. (I have seen that some functionality is only available on arrays initialised by higher version numbers of TOS 5, with earlier versions of TOS 5 initialising less compatible arrays)

[Gremlin]

At the moment there is no "pure" TOS6 installation package available. TOS6 is only available to the Beta test group as an update package. Hence you need to go for TOS5. It is worth it even if only for gaining experience of the product.

[docchris]

I know the beta generally available isn't available yet, and yes I can install a play with TOS 5 on the system partition fine, but I was hoping for more guidance on actually formatting the data partition and whether there would be any benefit to wait until until TOS 6 came out as beta, or if it would be essentially interchangeable with the version of BTRFS created by TOS 5.

I know TOS uses mdadm to create the array before formatting it as a simple BTRFS volume, but some recent updates to BTRFS are backwards incompatible and have to be enables at mkfs time; hence me not wanting to mkfs with an older version if a significant update is right around the corner.

[Gremlin]

To date TOS6 is perfectly compatible with TOS5 file systems. The expectation is that users will be able to select on which drive(s) the OS is mounted with TOS6.

[docchris]

I would expect TOS 6 to be backward compatible.

But for example: migration of storage pools is only available on pools created by TOS 5.1.67 or later. So will there be / what are the chances that additional features are only available on storage pools created by TOS 6 or higher. By creating a pool using TOS 5, will there be something unavailable to me at a later date that I would have had access to if I have initialised the pool using TOS 6.

(I had a similar limit years ago with Synology. Pools created with early versions DSM couldn't be expanded past 16TB. Pools created by latter DSM had no such issue)

[Gremlin]

I'll get out my crystal ball tomorrow

[docchris]

Well there are people on here already running the beta, and at least one moderator, so they should be able to tell if there are any significant differences to the underlying filesystem between TOS versions.

[crisisacting]

Terra-Master has made mention of a forthcoming User Defined System Drive feature, which is not currently available in the Insider Preview builds, since as acknowledged, these preview builds are only available as an update to TOS 5.1.× releases; clean/fresh installation (×.INS) builds could likely arrive when there are Public Beta releases, however at the moment they remain not available.

Your latest generation NAS could/should gain support in the Public Beta; the current Insider Preview has been restricted specifically to ×21/×22/×23 series devices only.