I want to purchase an EX4100 for my NAS and Personal Cloud use.
I have four 4TB WD RED drives that currently function in a FreeNAS Mini server, v2 that I purchased a year ago. After nearly a year I have proved myself not sufficiently literate or smart enough to use the FreeNAS Mini as a personal cloud. I am going to change to a MyCloud EX4100 server which to seems to be much more user friendly. I intend to take the four 4TB WD RED drives from the FreeNAS Mini and install them in the EX4100.
Should I expect any issues? Will the EX4100 simple install the drives and format them for RAID 5 when I launch the MyCloud Dashboard and select that configuration? I realize I will lose the existing data on the drives.
I’m not sure those pages answer my question. They seem to contain general information about adding/installing internal drives and configuring RAID configuration.
My question (and perhaps it may not be a good question) goes to whether or not I might encounter issues with adding/installing otherwise appropriate drives that have pre-existing content and formatting from another system and OS.
I need to refresh my memory on this topic, but if FreeNAS supports a feature named “Roaming RAID” then you should just be able to take the drives out of the FreeNAS server and insert them into an EX4100 enclosure. Not sure if this is just a Western Digital feature.
When I set-up the RAID5 array I was given the option to create a roaming RAID and I selected that option.
Myron, I don’t believe that I can take advantage of roaming RAID. The iXSystems FreeNAS Mini uses ZFS (Zettabyte File system) encryption and and I have formatted the system to ZFS RAID 6, an implementation of RAID 5 proprietary to ZFS encrypted systems, if I understand the system correctly.
