EX4100 - Help with RAID Transition - JBOD to RAID 10?

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud EX Series
1

I kindly need some advice, about possibly switching my RAID configuration on my EX4100.

Current: I have two 3TB hard drives in RAID1 (Volume 1) and two 5 TB hard drives in JBOD (Volumes 2 and 3). Only 1 out of the two hard JBOD hard drives has any information on it.

Problem: While my home screen shows 5.27TB free, recently when I was trying to add media files to my media folder (which I believe is mapped to the RAID 1 / Volume 1 drives), it said I was out of space. As a result, I have rethought my configuration and wondered if I shouldn’t try to convert the two 5TB hard drives to RAID 1, as well. But, then I read the different RAID types and thought that RAID 10 might allow me to not only convert volumes 2 and 3 to RAID 1, but, also span the drives, so I don’t get the out of space messages for my media folder.

Concerns:
I only have one option under RAID 10, “Switch to RAID 10”, so I am concerned…
(1) Would I lose any information on the RAID 1 if I switch to RAID 10?
(2) Only 1 volume out of the 2 JBOD 5TB disks has data on it, but, would I lose that data during the RAID 10 conversion?

Question:
(1) Would it be better to convert to the two JBOD disks to RAID 1 first and then convert to two RAID 1s to RAID `10? Would I lose any of my JBOD disk data (only 1 JBOD hard drive has any data), during this conversion.
(2) Can I convert to RAID 10 for all 4 disks (3 Volumes), right now?
(3) If either of my 2 ideas directly above are a bad idea, what process would you recommend?

Thank you in advance for your help and guidance and especially for taking time out of your day to help. Have a good evening.

~ Jack

2

Hello,

If you switch to RAID 10 which requires the four drives, all the data in either your RAID 1 or JBOD will be deleted.

You can migrate your JBOD to RAID 1 as you just have data on one of the drives and this process will only reformat one of them. However, you won’t be able to “migrate” to RAID 10 even though you have two RAID 1, you will need to “switch” which means the four drives will be reformatted.

So, if you want to have RAID 10, the best option is to back up all your data, switch to RAID 10 and transfer the data back to the My Cloud EX4100.

3

Thank you for the response.

Makes perfect sense. Only thing was when I tried to convert jbod to raid 1 today, the software wanted to format all 4 hard drives. No dice, so it stays jbod for now

Now, I’ve got bigger fish to fry though. I just got my second smart drive failure message (1 of my jbod disks, not sure which one?) and my NAS has been plagued by a “system under temperature” critical error message a lot. I’m starting to think I have a lemon NAS and don’t want to risk any more of my drives. I have started copying my jbod disk 1 data to jbod disk 2, but, have no idea how long it will take or when it’s I’ll be finished because I can’t find if or where the wd reports this data. I suppose I will check the CPU utilization after work tomorrow; which may give me an indication if it’s still copying?

I will search in the forums and internet first and if I can’t find a solution I’ll post in a separate thread. Thanks again.