Need to replace my drives in My Cloud EX 2 NAS

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

Hello,

I have a MyCloud EX 2 NAS.

I have 2 Hard Drives currently installed in the device.

Drive 1 is about 5 years old.
Drive 2 is about 3 years old.

Drive 1 is 4tb
Drive 2 is 2tb

I am using the “JBOD” RAID mode.

I have 1.75 TB storage remaining. I can’t move everything over to 1 drive since I’m using about 4.14TB out of 5.89TB

I started getting some errors / warnings about drive 1. It is currently working and I haven’t had any issues yet. The LED light for drive 1 is red right now but so far everything is still working fine. I would post the warnings / errors that I was getting but as of right now i don’t see them on the web interface. It currently says that the system is “healthy”.

I would like to replace both the drives before I have any issues with my data. I purchased 2x 4TB Hard Drives to replace the old drives but I am having trouble cloning the original drives.

I have a Hard Drive cloning device that I’ve used in the past. I tried to clone the drives using this device. After cloning both drives I installed them into the NAS, booted up the NAS and the status LEDs are red and I can’t get onto the web interface. Reinstalled the original drives and the NAS works fine again. So I am assuming my drive cloning device cannot handle cloning my NAS drives for some reason.

Here are some things that I own…

  • The drive cloning device I mentioned before. For whatever reason this does not seem to be working.
  • I have an external HDD enclosure (SATA to USB enclosure).
  • I have a windows PC on the same network as the NAS

I am fairly tech savy. I just want to make sure I am going about this the right way before I lose about 4tb of movies, tv shows, work documents, etc…

2

Hi @mattbfalcone,

Please refer to the mentioned link 2 and 4 Bay Internal Drive Replacement for WD My Cloud: 2 and 4 Bay Internal Drive Replacement for WD My Cloud

Also,Please contact the WD Technical Support team for best assistance and troubleshooting:
https://support-en.wd.com/app/ask

3

Hello,

I think I might be missing the section that goes over how to keep all my files. All these instructions look like reformatting all the drives is required…

Is this what I can do?

  1. I have JBOD currently running on my NAS so I can remove the old drive in slot 2 and the system will still function / turn on

  2. I install a new hard drive into slot 2

  3. Change the raid mode to duplicate/mirror drive 1 onto drive 2.

  4. Take out old drive 1 and replace it with the new drive currently in slot 2

  5. Put “old drive 2” back into place in slot 2 and switch the raid back to JBOD

Assuming I understand the process… How do I replace the old drive in slot 2? The same process but reversed? I’m very confused by this process I feel like I need a second NAS or a huge external drive to save my data temporarily while I upgrade the drives. Is that correct?

4

Thank you @Keerti_01 for actually posting useful information.

If you have a failing drive 1; you cannot “replace it” within the EX2 box without wiping the data.

I would have thought that CLONING the two EXT4 linux volumes should have worked. . .but apparently not.

I would try the following:

  1. Install the two new drives.
  2. Format the new drives as you will.
  3. Install old drive into USB enclosure
  4. Using LINUX file reader software; copy old drive to new NAS drive (Out of the box; Windows won’t recognize the EXT4 linux volume; however there are programs that will allow you to read the linux EXT4 volume)