4TB to 12TB - HDD Capacity Upgrade

Hi All, 

I recently bought a WD MYBOOK LIVE DUO 4TB NAS which came with 2 * 2TB WD Green HDDs. I would, now, like to upgrade these HDDs with 2 * 6TB WD RED NAS HDDs. To enquire about the possibility and the correct procedure, I sent an email to WD Customer Support 4 days ago but have not recieved an answer. Therefore I was wondering if some one else has had any such luck or experiance, the advise would be highly appriciated. Thank you.

Regards.

Hello and welcome to the community.

I have never tried this since it is not supported. Lets see if another user with experience can share some advices with us.

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Hi Hamlet,

So I got a reponse from WD support the other day, here it is:

Dear Mr. Hameed,

Thank you for contacting Western Digital Customer Service and Support. My name is [[Deleted - Trancer]].

I will gladly assist you.

Unfortunately what you intend to do is not possible or supported.

You can only replace the drives with completely the same model and size. And always only one drive at the time, since they contain the operating system, so replacing both at the same time would make the device useless.

If you have any further questions, please reply to this email and we will be happy to assist you further.

Sincerely,

[[Deleted - Trancer]]

Western Digital Service and Support

Ref#: [[Deleted - Trancer]]

http://support.wdc.com

I guess that means that I will have to follow ‘other’ guides, as and when available because WD policy is as negative as it gets. The consumer is stuck with his/her purchase indefinately.

Hello,

How this?

As far as i remember one can order this box also without any disk pre-loaded.

So how to configure these boxes with custom disks inside?

Any hints?

Perhaps this is only correct for the newer My Cloud EX2 series?

Grunzer wrote:

As far as i remember one can order this box also without any disk pre-loaded.

No.  The Duo has never been available “empty.”  All Duos came pre-installed with drives.

Only the EX2 / EX4 are available without disks.

Mavrick,

My case is different than yours but might help.

For myself I did purchase a 2 x 4TB RAID 1 My Book Duo.

I needed another enclosure and needed to increase capacity in my existing QNap NAS from 2x2TB to 2x4TB RAID 1.

I figured the WD My Book Duo was a good deal rather than paying for invidual parts : 2 x 4TB Disks + Enclosure.

So, I swapped my Qnap NAS 2 x 2TB with the WD 2 x 4TB with success.

Now My WD has the 2 TB in RAID 1 (2 x 2 TB).

Everything is running smootlhy.

JM

Hi there jmverreault,

Thanks for your input. Although it is possible to install a bigger HDD in the enclosure (without the availability of the additioinal storage space), I find it interesting that you were able to swap the bigger HDD with a small HDD without any issues. In this particular case, it appears that the OS fixed everyting itself.

Having said that, it appears that the OS does not take well to expansion and the storage remain fixed to the initial RAID drive capacity…which happens to be 2TB in my case.

I am still looking for a solution to my unique problem. I want to go from 2*2TB to 2 * 6TB. Thanks.

Regards.

I also purchased 4T MBL DUO with no HDD.

Looking forward to increase size. 

Is there any debricking procedure ?

Following the procedure here. (Use guild 2 for new HDDs)

http://community.wd.com/t5/My-Book-Live-Duo/GUIDE-Debrick-a-MyBookLive-DUO/td-p/544860

Mav3rick wrote:

Hi there jmverreault,

 

Thanks for your input. Although it is possible to install a bigger HDD in the enclosure (without the availability of the additioinal storage space), I find it interesting that you were able to swap the bigger HDD with a small HDD without any issues. In this particular case, it appears that the OS fixed everyting itself.

 

Having said that, it appears that the OS does not take well to expansion and the storage remain fixed to the initial RAID drive capacity…which happens to be 2TB in my case.

 

I am still looking for a solution to my unique problem. I want to go from 2*2TB to 2 * 6TB. Thanks.

 

Regards.

Have you personally tried this? I currently am running a 6TB MBLD and was looking to double the capacity by purchasing (2) 6TB drives. I’m guessing it’s impossible for me to pull this off?

I’ve justed replaced my 2x 2TB in RAID1 with 2x 4TB in RAID1

The data and RAID works but it’s still reporting quotas as 2TB. Apart from the “storage” tab, which shows the 4TB capacity and serial numbers of the drives.

Has anyone got this to work? Why would it be so difficult to upgrade the harddrives? This is currently £300 of hard drives that are useless

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I can tell you how to upgrade a smaller MBL DUO to a bigger MBL DUO – except this is an exception that will help only a very few. Like me. I’m kind of a nut and I like having tons of storage, so I own multiple MBL DUOs. I think they are going out of production (or at least availability is limited) so I decided to round out my fleet of one 3TB single, one 3TB/6TB and two 4TB/8TBs and recently bought a fourth DUO, 4TB/8TB. I’m RAIDing it right now!

Then I thought, what a shame my 3TB/6TB unit isn’t 4TB/8TB – so I’d have 4 identical 4TB/8TB units - a total of 16TB RAID. (That ought to hold me a while… :stuck_out_tongue:

It’s really simplei when you think about it. The only problem is buying two compatible 4TB drives. The rest is obvious.

Take out the two 3TB drives, replace one with a new 4TB drive, borrow a 4TB from my new MBL DUO. Rebuild. Then put the borrowed unit back and put the other new 4TB drive in the previously 3TB unit, rebuild again. End result: four 4TB/8TB units and two extra 3TB drives.

One thing i really like about the MBL is they run my favorite OS: Debian. I’ve also got a Debian desktop. So… All I need to do to avoid wasting the two 3TB HDDs is put them in my desktop – and I have another 6TB of online storage. :smileyvery-happy:

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Banned wrote:

Take out the two 3TB drives, replace one with a new 4TB drive, borrow a 4TB from my new MBL DUO. Rebuild. Then put the borrowed unit back and put the other new 4TB drive in the previously 3TB unit, rebuild again. End result: four 4TB/8TB units

 

If you could upload a system img file of your MBLD 2x4TB system, then anyone else could install that img file on their new 2x4TB MBLD and accomplish the same end result as you. 

See here about how to generate and save the img file.  It does not save you data, just the OS and OS settings.

http://community.wd.com/t5/My-Book-Live/GUIDE-Build-a-Custom-Firmware/m-p/533729#M18066

After much reading and much learning curve I now know a lot more about this subject.

I don’t know how large a drive the MBL’s BIOS will handle, but you can certainly upgrade to 2x 4TB because that is the largest size we know works for sure. Just get WD Green 4TB drives for this project. Let’s say we are going from 2x 2TB to 2x 4TB.

Remove one of the 2TB drives and insert the 4TB, let it rebuild. Replace the other 2TB with the other new 4TB, rebuild, Now you will still show only 2x 2TB. That is easily fixed by using parted (partition manager) to go in and increase the data partition from 2TB to 4TB. (You will need to use the exact numbers reported by parted print.)

Now the big question: Could you go to 6 or 8 TB drives? If the BIOS can handle it I’m pretty sure that would be possible, but (LOL) not willing to spend the money on it.

There’s another post around here with details. I forgot where I saw it.

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Somehow my two HDs stopped working. I do not know what happened. Patience. But now I have bought two more HDs that are the same and I do not know how to reinstall the Operating System on my My Book Live Duo HD. Could anyone guide me?

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I installed larger hard drives in the My Book Live Duo using a slightly different manner. My original MBLD had 2X2TB drives in a raid 1 configuration so I removed the disk labeled as drive B. I replaced it with a WD Green 3TB drive. I let the MBLD rebuild the array with the 2TB drive in Drive A and the new 3TB drive in drive B. The MBLD build the new drive as a 2TB drive even though it physically was a 3TB drive. I removed the 3TB drive and plugged it into a Linux box running Ubuntu Linux. I used GPARTED and displayed the drive. The 4th partition was the data partition and then there was almost a full Terabyte that was unallocated. I was not able to simply resize the volume. Regardless of what I tried everything failed because the resize option was grayed out. So I formatted the 4th partition as a EXT4 partition and then resized the partition to include the additional Terabyte of space. Then I removed the 2 TB drive from drive A slot in the MBLD and put in the new 3TB drive that I had modified the 4th partition. I also put in another 3TB drive in slot B and powered up the MBLD. The red light came on when the MBLD initialized so I opened the dashboard and performed a Factory Restore. Once the Factory Restore completed my 4TB MBLD was now a 6TB MBLD. Note: My MBLD is connected to my network via an Ethernet connection instead of the USB port. As I see it this is certainly easier than trying to follow the DeBrick scripts if your MBLD is still functioning. I tried the scripts that I found online and I was not able to successfully increase the size of my MBLD. I hope this helps anyone attempting to increase the storage space of your MBLD.

The thing that you all need to note is that only WD drives will work, UNFORTUNATELY.

Use the process above, by snakeman, to simply upgrade the capacity of your WBLD with larger HDD’s. Use the process I explained above to recover a bricked MBLD unit and increase the capacity.

Mav3rick,

Are you absolutely sure that only WD drives will work in a My Book Live Duo? The reason that I ask is I have seen posts where Hitachi HDS5C404 drives were used in place of the WD Greens. I saw another post were any drive would work as long as they were the lower RPM drives with lower Temps because of the MBLD requirements so I am confused. I used WD drives to increase the space of my MBLD, but it was because of personal preference alone. At some point I may increase the size of my unit again and I had not planned on buying WD drives so I wanted to make sure before wasting my money on larger drives.

Well, I tried to do the same thing with 2 * 10TB Seagates but the enclosure would not recognize the drives.

You may also know that Hitachi is now owned by WD and so perhaps both Hitachi and WD drives have some sort of similar Firmware recognition pattern that enables the enclosure to recognize and accept HGST Drives.

I would also like to add that I bought an ASUSTOR AS-6204T NAS last year and it is absolutely amazing. It is probably better value for money that any other NAS out there. if anyone is considering an upgrade.