Device does not recognize/format new drive

[Krishna108]

This is my first message here and I’m something of a novice with this technology.

I purchased the diskless My Cloud EX4 device and purchased a single 6TB Red drive from Western Digital. I inserted it into bay 1, got it formatted, and everything is going well.

Now I purchased another 6TB Red Drive and inserted it into bay 2 - but I cannot find it under the list of drives to be formatted under the utilities menu in the web interface. When I look under storage/disk status, the second drive is listed there and in “good” condition. But when I go to Settings/Utilities and select Format Disk, it only lists Volume 1 which I assume is my first drive.

I have verified that the firmware is up to date. Has anyone encountered this problem and have a solution?

[ArMak]

Hello there and welcome to the WD community.

Try to insert the new drive alone on the unit and then partition he volume by going to the storage section, after this you will be able to create a jbod volume. Unless you are trying to create a RAID volume you can try this, hope it helps.

[Krishna108]

Hi ArMak. Sorry for the delayed reply. To make a long story short, your approach worked, sort of. Removing the existing drive and putting the new one in allowed me to format it. Since I am doing jbod and not RAID, this is probably ok for my purposes. However, when I reinserted the old drive (which was previously formatted as Volume 1), the drive had to “reintegrate” it with the newly formatted drive (which it now called Volume 1), and ended up calling the old Volume 1 as Volume 2. This had lead to a bit of confusion since I wanted the drive in Bay 1 to be Volume 1, the drive in Bay 2 to be Volume 2, etc, and I wanted the drives in the Bays to have a certain order so that I would know exactly what each one does.

Is there some way to tell the NAS system to relabel the existing drives in the order that I want them? Currently my Volume 2 is in Bay 1 and my Volume 1 is in Bay 2 - I want the drive in Bay 1 to stay there and be called Volume 1, etc.

Also, I’m confused as to why this roundabout approach was necessary just to format a new drive. Is it meant to be like this by design? When I add a third and 4th hard drives, will I have to remove the old ones just to format the new one, and then reinsert them and go through the “integration” process again?

[ArMak]

Hi,

Something you can try, but it will erase the drive is re creating the JBOD on the device, i have not seen this before, lets see if another user can share some tips and information on this matter.

[Krishna108]

That would not be an option - I have too much data to recreate the JBOD and erase the drive.

Am I the only one having this problem? Or does everyone remove their old drives to format a new one?