EX4 to PR4100 Upgrade Questions

I am looking at potentially replacing an EX4 (16TB) with a PR4100. I am contemplating this to get access to the Plex media server capabilities that stopped working on the EX4 after a previous firmware upgrade. I have a few question I hope the community would provide insight before I make the purchase if possible.

Is it possible to reuse the WD40EFRX drives from the EX4 in the PR4100 chassis? Ideal situation would be to just move the 4 drives from one chassis to other chassis and reboot. My assumption is that this strategy would not work and I would need to perform some backup/restore operation or possible just a bulk data move between the devices. I do have another EX4 I could use if the bulk move is only option. Suggestions on data strategy.

Next question, power supplies. I have dual power supplies for the existing EX4 devices. Are these power supplies compatible with the PR4100. I like to keep dual power supplies and it seems reading the threads that there don’t seem to be second power supplies in abundance to be ordered yet.

Final question UPS. Looking at the PR4100 user manual it seems to have the same verbiage for the UPS section as the EX4. I have UPS connections to the existing EX4s and it looks as if I could just unplug from EX4 and reconnect to PR4100. Any issues I am overlooking.

Finally, the EX4 and PR4100 both seem to have the same link aggregation capabilities so other than configuring the PR4100, I would expect them to operate exactly the same. Good assumption?

First if your intention is just to get plex to work there are alternatives.

Second i dont believe that you can swap the drive from one ex2 to another ex2 bay as the settings are stored in that bay about the HDD . May be hdd might also have some indexing data bay used to store. No one tried.

You can see if another ex4 takes the hdd without any hicups

Getting pr4100 empty bay how much does it cost.

If it is just plex you need get a X10 router from Netgear . Unless your new bay less than router price.

As currently router can support link aggregation and support for NAS storage indexing for plex. So its all in solution

X10 NIGHTHAWK

Just looked in amazon the empty bay cost you close to 500 bugs

this on the other hand 350 only if some card or instant cash you can get even at 300. It doubles as plex server and latest wifi powerhouse

PR4100

X10 NETGEAR NIGHTHAWK

Thanks for the response. I was sure I was going to need to move the data off the drives prior to moving them into the pr1000. I expected the first thing the PR4100 to do was to reformat the drive to build in the RAID configuration. I am thinking I could reuse the drives to avoid having to but new ones yet. The EX4 unit while serviceable was always underpowered. I realize the drives are slower than drives I could put in but I always thought the performance seen by device was due to cpu capabilities. The network monitoring tools managing the switches have never shown the network to remotely being a factor during the use of the EX4 devices even when I was hammering them during performance testing with bulk data moves, along with simultaneous video streaming. Between the link aggregation/frame sizes etc, the results of my testing has always shown the only thing that could speed it up would be things that could increase performance of EX4. The PR4100 has a better cpu and memory config. Only thing left would be to increase speed of drives. As previous performance was ok I would defer the drive costs until needed.

I thought the pr4100 with a faster CPU would give better performance than experienced with EX4. Only issue I have with EX4 is that it isn’t supported by Plex anymore. My performance was ok, not great but ok. The PR4100 appears to have hardware transcoding capability which I thought was a plus. All of my video in home routes through a central video/audio distribution system so Wifi to end devices doesn’t figure into decision.

Relative to the Nighthawk router. I recently (6 months ago) upgraded my home to the Linksys EA9500 and 4 RS7000s (due to size and configuration of home) . I probably would have considered the Nighthawk if I was aware of it when I made upgrade. I do not have any issues with wireless speeds in home so I wasn’t concerned with that aspect of it. I am a pretty hard core IT consultant and have 3 x 1GB switches with fiber interconnects hanging off the EA9500 to support a lab with disk disk arrays and other interesting computing devices so getting a config that supports all the VPN tunnels and IPSEC protocols configured correctly is an effort I would rather not due again in near future.

I purchased the PR4100 and found the power supplies are compatible. In my case I am moving one of the 2 power supplies I had to PR4100. The remaining EX4 will have 1. I will use the EX4 as a backup storage location for the PR4100.
Also found link aggregation capabilities are the same as are the UPS capabilities.

Purchased device with full disk bays so never figured out question of disk compatibility but looking at docs the should be reusable. That is after they reformat in new device.