I just purchased a new EX2 Ultra. I have one new WD Red 4TB drive currently in the device. I want to add a second matching drive later, but to save on funds I have one for now. I have a couple questions but the first one is related to gett the device totally setup. I went through the setup wizard from the dashboard and all went well. When I get in on the disk status screen I see my 1 4TB drive and it says its good. When I try to create a share though it says “No volume found”. I assume that means I need to format the drive or something but I didn’t see how to get the drive ready any place in the instructions and I want to make sure to do it right.
Can someone point me to or give me instructions for getting the drive ready?
Second, more long term here is my plan w/ this drive can someone tell me if its ok or not. I didn’t have the dollars now to buy a second 4TB drive so I could setup RAID 1 now. I have an older WD Green 2TB drive that came out of a faulty older WD my cloud device. This drive currently has maybe a 1TB of data on it and it has most of the things I want to keep on my new EX2. Can I copy the data off of my old WD Green drive (drive works well) to my new Red 4TB drive. Then format the green 2TB drive and install it as my second drive in the EX2? Then can I setup Raid 1 as long as I know that will limit my first drive to 2 TB total? Then my thought was later when I start getting close to 2 Tb of data and I have more cash I can pickup another 4TB red drive pull the green drive insert the red drive and then I could use RAID 1 up to 4TB. Are there any flaws w/ that strategy? I was worried about having to format the drive and loosing data when I pull the green drive out but it seems like it would be the same as if the green drive died and I had to replace one of the drives in my raid set right?
I should also add my goal for this is to protect my personal household stuff and make it accessible to my family. Basically family photos, music, movies and such. I want to always at least have a backup on a second disk and raid at some point just so I have little chance of loosing our pics etc.
That is my first question. How should i set up the 4gb drive. I installed the drive and i can see it but when i try to create a share it says no volume so i assume i have to setup the drive. I stopped bc i wanted to make sure to set the drive up right for my plan.
You cant setup mirror RAID 1 or 0 with 1 drive. You need 2 drives.
No you cant raid 2 unequal sized drives in RAID. you have to use JBOD. That makes sense. You setup the 4tb as JBOD and then copy all the files to it and then insert the 2tb one and set that as well JBOD. once you have the new 4tb then you can rearrange things back to green one and then re-setup as RAID 1.
I believe RAID 0 is not a usefull with this 1 Lan port devices. As it wont get you any more than 1gbps line where the max would be 116MB/s which you get via single hdd in JBOD so already lan port is throttled . So no dont go for RAID 0 you loose half the size and its wont do any good and woth the sacrifice for nill performance improvement.
Thanks for the input Dirty. I think I got it so I can’t create RAID 1 until I get a second 4TB drive so I should set them both up as JBOD for now and basically just backup one drive to the second drive. Then when I get a second 4TB drive I can move data to the Green 2TB drive fromat both 4TB drives fro RAID 1 and then copy data back? I assume when I switch from JBOD to RAID later I will loose all data on either of the RAID drives? So I will have to copy the data off and then back to the RAID set after its configured? It would be easier if I could copy inside of the EX2 opposed to externally copying. That is why I hoped that I could create a RAID set and just use 2TB of the space on the drive.
