Migrating an Existing RAID 1 from DLink to WD EX2 Ultra

[dtbritt]

Hi all, new member here, please be gentle.

I was hoping for some clarification/confirmation about what I thought would be a straightforward process, but turns out I knew just enough to cause trouble. Here’s my situation:

I had a DLink DNS321 with two disks, each 2 TB, set up as a RAID 1. On my WIN10 system, SMB1 was removed, and the DNS became a very attractive and heavy paperweight. I upgraded to the EX2 Ultra, and had planned on simply porting my drives from the DNS to the EX2.

Well, it didn’t work. I have a similar scenario described in this thread:

How to use a disk with pre loaded content on the WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra

I have two 3 TB WD Red disks with content (media files and the like). The disks are formatted as EXT4 and were being used on an Ubuntu System. I want them to be now loaded into the two bays of the EX2 Ultra and in doing so do not want any RAID configurations. I just want the content accessible over my local network as a network share. When I load the disk, it shows the disk status as good, but does not allow me to chare content as it shows no volumes when I try to create a share. The disk LE…

After reading through some threads here, as well as on other forums, I THINK what I need to do is the following. I was hoping some of y’all with a little more skill than I would be able to give me a thumbs up, or get me to pump the breaks.

1. I luckily have an unused desktop and additional external storage such that I can back up one of the disks, just in case. If I’m not mistaken, I should be able to connect via USB the EX2 to the desktop, and simply copy the files over for backup.

2. I power everything down, take out one disk (let’s say Disk 2) from the the EX2, boot it back up, and format the remaining disk (Disk 1) via the EX2 to get the WD ROM installed on the disk.

3. I power everything down again, add the disk that still has data on it (Disk 2), and power on the EX2.

4. I can now copy the data from the data disk (Disk 2) to the EX2 formatted disk (Disk 1).

5. I format the second disk via the EX2, and set up a RAID 1 share.

If all that fails, the worst case scenario is that I just format both drives as a RAID 1 share via the EX2, and copy the backup data back on to the share.

How accurate is all of that?

Thanks!

David