I am considering the purchase of the 4TB My Book Live Duo. If in the future I run out of available harddrive space, can I drop in two new higher capacity drives. For example, two 3TB or two 4TB drives ?
Gordon
Yes you can, but the maximum supported capacity is 3TB per HDD.
This raises an interesting question. If one replaced a 2Tb drive with a 3Tb drive and allow the NAS’s firmware to rebuild rebuild the RAID array will the data pertition on the replacemt drive be expanded to use the full drive or be the same size as the original drive, thus wasting 1Tb of the new drive becaue it’s unallocated.
There are conflicting ideas on this. Does anyone know if this is possible?
My guess is that 1Tb will be wasted.
are you sure? coz I replaced my 2 2TB HDD for 2 of 1TB (just to try), and it didn’t start, so i guess that you will need to install some kind of OS or something :S
I’ll have to have a proper look but there is one mandatory RAID1 array set-up. This is the MBLD’s OS so replacing a drive of the same capacity should at least replicate the OS partition onto the new drive. When it comes to the data volume it dependds if you have set-up RAID or SPANNING. The latter is not fault tolerant but you get the most storage from the MBLD…
As you have replaced both drives at the same time, you ae correct, you will need to put an OS on the MBLD, but my gess is that the controller is custom-built by Western Digital so you are not going to be able to just simply install an operating system.
Possibly, you can get one “replacement” drive from Western Digital that is pre-formatted and set-up and the second could be a drive of the same capacity but blank? Western Digital would recommend that you buy the replacement drive off them.
To be honest, would have been metter if the main OS was held in some sort of FLASH memory, but I guess they did what they did and hold the OS on the drives to keep the manufacturing cost down.
