EX2 (8TB) with RAID1 (4+4) Disk Upgrade

Hello,

Anyone here has tried to upgrade your own EX2 with a new bigger hard drive (Assume 2 new WD red series), which essentially doen’t have to break or disrupt the existing data or copy the data out to somewhere then put in back with a new RAID1 setup such as (6+6)? I would like to explore if EX2 can intelligently rebuild the RAID1 with one of the replaced upgrade disk (4+6), then followed with the remaining one (6+6).

Thanks

I think if you’ll do it, RAID 1 will be builded in a size of old HDD, and extra space will be in JBOD mode.
I think the only way to do what you want, install new drives in My Cloud, connect one of the old drives to your computer and copy your data.
You need a computer with Linux operating system, or you have to install Ext2Fsd plugin for Windows.

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Starting with two drives A1 and A2 in RAID1, you want to migrate to bigger drives B1 and B2 also in RAID1.

If all the drives are WD Red drives then they are all “compatible” with the My Cloud EX2. Setting Auto-Rebuild=OFF prevents the rebuilding of the RAID.

The proposed migration was: Remove A2 and Add B1. Rebuild the RAID. Remove A2 and add B2 and rebuild the RAID a second time. Finally resize the RAID. The problem with this is that rebuilding the RAID takes time and there is the risk that the data on A1 might get corruputed. Also the resize may not be possible so you are left with partitions of the original size and JBOD partitions for the rest.

A better migration (has anyone tried it)?

  1. If A1 and A2 are removed and B1 and B2 are put in the system then a new RAID 1 can be setup. This is a normal activity for the system and also quick to do. Have the option to copy some files from PC or Mac to the new RAID. Can also put A1 and A2 back to get back the original RAID.

  2. If only one drive is in the system e.g. A1 you can still access the data. The RAID 1 operates in a degraded mode because only half the partitions are available. Similarly for another drive e.g. B1 by itself.

  3. With mixed drives e.g. A1 and B1 they cannot be part of the same RAID because they are each part of a different RAID e.g. have different UUID identifiers. Also Auto-Rebuild=OFF prevents any rebuild from one disk to the other. Can see the old files from A1 and also any new files on B1. Have the option to copy files from A1 to B1 only, so that A1 is unchanged.

  4. With drives B1 and B2 the RAID 1 can be manually restored, transferring the newer data from B1 across to B2. This is a normal activity of a RAID and the size of the RAID does not change.

  5. Optionally can keep (unchanged) drives A1 and A2 as a backup of the original RAID 1 setup. No need to copy off the data to another temporary drive C or grow the partitions or manually resize any of the partitions on another linux system with the risks of getting it wrong e.g. copying data from the wrong drive or failing to resize a partition successfully.

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Thank you for the proposed solutions. I am hoping Western Digital hear customer feedback here and provide an official upgrade guide for the EX series consumers.

This is 3 years ago. Has there been any development on this topic please? Is there an “officially sanctioned” way of moving the NAS to a bigger harddrives (RAID1)?

Thx