How to increase EX2 hard drive capacity once already in use?

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud EX2
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I currently have 2 3TB HDD setup in a mirrored raid on my EX2 WDBVKW0000NCH-NESN and wondering what the best way to migrate to bigger drives is if you don’t have another location to back up to first. Would it be possible to power down the NAS, remove the drives, install the new higher capacity drives, set up mirrored raid etc. then connect one of the old 3TB drives via cable to my desktop/laptop and copy files off that way? Whats the best method?

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Hello debun,

It is important to create a backup before using 3TB drives in enclosure. Otherwise, during RAID rebuild process using one 2TB drive and new one 3TB drive, there would be a loss of 1TB.
So I would suggest you to first take a backup at another location or in computer, then connect these drives for direct data transfer after mapping the drives.

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Making a backup is always the preferred route. If it is me - - → I would buy an external USB, do the backup, and then store the backup in different house (safe deposit box, parent’s house, office desk).

HOWEVER, it is theoretically possible to do it without a backup;

Method 1: BRUTE FORCE:

  • remove the 2x3tb drives;

  • Connect to the drives using a PC (note: The drives are in a LINUX format, so some additional software is required)

  • install new 6TB drives and let the EX2 do it’s thing.

  • When complete; you can copy data from PC to new drives

Method 2: Trust the software

  • In the EX2 dashboard menus, there is a place to change RAID configuration. One of the options is “expand”. If you hit this, The system will prompt you to replace first one drive, then later (after it builds all the data), it will prompt you to replace the other drive.

  • I suspect (cannot confirm) that it is not critical to chose “expand” before starting drive replacement. However, if you just swap one drive, then rebuild, then replace other drive. . .it sounds logical that you would wind up with 3TB capacity (not 6TB). HOWEVER, if you expand. . it will then claim the extra space.

There are two threads that may have useful information:

If I was doing it. . . I would make a backup, then “trust the software” :wink:

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Can you state what software is needed to read the drive in Windows? I would love to make a backup first but I would need to borrow an external HD in order to do so.

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I do not know what software to use to read a bare drive out of a EX2.
I would do a search of the forums on this topic; I have seen the question come up more than once.

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You can just replace the drives one by one.
After the last RAID rebuild there is an option to extend the volume in the RAID menu to use the full capacity.

It’s a mirror RAID setup so you don’t need a backup: all disks are copies. You can always recover the data from a single disk.

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