Can drives be removed an added to nas?

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

I have a total of 7 western digital hard drives, 6 8TB my books and 1 16TB my book duo.

It has become quite a project getting them all working properly with various usb 3 hubs.

Can I take the hard drives out of their enclosure and add them to a NAS such as a synology without losing all my data on them?

2

No, you will lose all of your data.

My Books have hardware encryption, remove the hard drive from the enclosure and you’ll lose access to all your data.

3

I suspect you will lose ALL access to any drive removed from it’s enclosure… Your computer will not SEE any extracted drives!!! This appears to be WD’s solution to people buying external drives and removing the drives for use internally!!! It also stops any attempt from recovery of failed externals.
This is NOT the case with Seagate drives! With Seagate, if your external fails, just crack the case open, extract the drive and plug it into a MB port and away you go…

4

Well, the question is it possible to put those hard drive in the the Synology NAS without losing data. Regardless of WD has a encryption on the hardware or not. Most NAS product will not read the drive data unless it is format it as EXT3 or EXT4. If you insert a format NTFS or HFS drive or EXFAT, those NAS product devices will still ask you to format the drive anyway for it to be able to use either in JBOD, RAID1, RAID5, etc…

5

Probably not related to your original question but I have managed to access (perfectly) an 8Tb drive removed from a WD Elements XHDD… No encryption or funny business, just the pin 3 power disable changed SATA 3 specs… Good Luck…