How to Increase Drive capacity of EX2?

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud EX2
1

I have a My Cloud EX2 with 2 x 3TB disks in RAID1 formation, but would like to replace the drives to gain extra capacity.

Is it possible to increase the array’s capacity by:

  1. replacing Disk 2 with a larger drive (eg. 4TB) and allowing the RAID to rebuild
  2. then replacing Disk 1 with a larger disk, and again allowing the array to rebuild?

Judging from replies to a similar question in the forum for a different type of WD NAS, the MBWE II, MBWE ii increase capacity to 2x 2TB it seems this may not work, as the MBWE II formats the replaced drive with the same (smaller) capacity of the existing drive, and they cannot be increased without reformatting BOTH drives, which destroys all data.

If the only way to increase the size of the NAS is by first copying all the data to another NAS/drive and then copying it back again (as is the case with the MBWE II) then I won’t do it, as this would involve purchasing a whole new NAS, which would come with its own larger drives anyway.

So I’d like to know if the My Cloud EX2 is smarter than the MBWE II in this regard?

2

Hello, I believe that it will work the same as the MBWE II, you can confirm this by contacting WD and see if they can provide this information.

1 Like
3

Hi Iluna, thank you very much for your reply. Actually yesterday I did ring WD Support to ask about this but I was not entirely confident with the answer provided. I explained that I was asking this question specifically about the EX2 because I had read on this forum that it would NOT work with the MBWE II and so I wanted to confirm whether the EX2 would be any different.

The support person told me that it definitely WOULD work with the EX2, and he seemed to think that this should be obvious - but had not actually heard of the MBWE II (saying it must be a very old model) - which is why, even though he was confident, I’m not 100% confident in his answer.

I would really love to hear from someone who has actually done this (or at least tried to) as I would be more confident then about whether or not it’s worth buying 2 new larger drives.