I have external drives.can I remove the drive from the housing and use in a EX4 or do i have to buy new drives
I would say probably not, but I am not an expert! WD has a list of hard drives that are compatible with the EX4
If you know what type of disk drive is inside the casing and if that drive is in the compatible list, yes you can.
Note however that the disk drives that come packaged in a casing usually have a lot less warranty than the bare drive but in any case, as soon as you open the case up, your warranty is toast.
At that point, You would be using the bare disk at your own risk without warranty.
if your external disk is already out of warranty anyway, you could use it as a internal disk with Ex4 but with associated risks.
I tried this initially to, at the time I was not so fortunate to have somebody point out to me the list of compatible drives.
1 of 4 of my Segate Baracuda external drives was recognized. It was a big disappointment from lack of knowledge and a tough sell to my spouse to buy the WD RED drives at additional costs.
In the end and after a more thorough understanding of the advantages of the RED drives I’m glad I did go for the RED drives vs trying to get any other off the shelf external drive working with it.
All that said, be very aware of of the added costs and compatibility issues that might arise buying this unit diskless.
For the total I spent on both diskless unit, and drives after the fact and the well documented lack luster performance and quirks of this NAS in retrospect I think I would have rather spent my money on a higher powered NAS in terms of both filesystem, network performance, and CPU. I’m not certain but I think the Marvel SoC types like this are quite underpowered.
If I had a do-over I’d go with a dual core synology diskstation or ZFS filesystem based NAS by ixsystems ( i3 based ) or even a BtrFS ( dual core or i3 ) based Netgear ReadyNAS.
I hope this insight helps you.
thankyou for your advice,most appreciated
