Data availability outside of WD products

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud EX2
1

I recently purchased a WD My Cloud EX2. I left it set up in RAID1 mode. Now I’m reconsidering that decision.

If the device fails, I would like to be able to easily access the data. So I’m wondering what my options are.

For RAID1, are the individual drives accessible as a regular JBOD drive or do I need a RAID controller to

access the data? If so, is it commonly known what other devices have a controller that is compatible?

Same question for JBOD. Is JBOD mode truly JBOD? Could I take each disk and access it on a regular O/S such

as Windows?

Same question for spanning mode. I presume your data is not easily readable unless you have a RAID controller?

What’s the advantage of spanning over RAID0? Or is each disk treated as a different volume?

Thanks,

Geoff

2

Hello,

On Raid1 if drive A fails then you will have access to your data on B drive.

in JBOD you can take each drive to a windows computer and read your data.

Spamming will combine all drives as a single volume.

3

Thanks for the response. Can you confirm that with spanning, the drives are unreadable by Windows if

I connect the drives directly? I’m guessing that’s the case.

Also, what’s the advantage of spanning over RAID0, if any? Sounds like it has the same limitations.

Thanks.

4

With Spanning the drives may not be readable since they will usually have a “RAID” type signature attached to them. The computer will most likely see them as part of RAID and not as individual drives if they are removed and attached individually.

RAID0 is called a ‘stripe’ and all data is saved (in an interweave style) across all the drives. In simple terms, the file is broken into pieces and a piece of each file is stored on each drive, this is why RAID0 is fast since a file is saved across multiple drives. In a Span, it typically works like an overflow. All data is stored to one drive, when that drive gets full, it then starts to store to the second drive and so on until the RAID volume is full.

I included a link below to our RAID KB that may help you

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/2767

5

Thanks for the reply. For others’ benefit, here is the salient point from the article referenced:

“The advantage of using this mode is that one can add more drives without having to reformat the system.”