I have an old My Cloud EX2 NAS (gen 1 I guess - not an Ultra) that is currently set up with encryption that I’d like to remove. The encryption is working properly; if I bring the NAS out of hibernation there are no shares, but if I go to storage→encryption and mount the volume (which by the way is was set up as RAID 1) I see a “wait while the drive is decrypted” message and when that goes away the shares are visible. As a side note the hoem dashboard says 0.00 MB free in terms of capacity, but that doesn’t match what should be available (2 TB drives, ~ 1TB used).
Anyway, what I want is the NAS unencrypted and RAID 1, and I don’t care about the data in the existing shares or even maintaining the shares. Basically want to start fresh, and wondering what the best way to do that is.
All help appreciated.
Since the existing data is not important and the goal is to start fresh with an unencrypted RAID 1 setup, the simplest solution is to reset the NAS and recreate the storage volume. On the WD My Cloud EX2, encryption cannot be removed from an existing volume, so the encrypted volume must be deleted and rebuilt. A factory restore can be done from the dashboard under Settings → Utilities, which resets the device. After the NAS restarts, go to Storage → RAID, delete the current volume, and create a new RAID 1 volume without enabling encryption. This will rebuild the storage from scratch and restore the correct capacity. If the dashboard still shows incorrect capacity, the drives can be removed and their partitions wiped on a computer before reinstalling them in the NAS, allowing the system to create a clean RAID 1 array without encryption.
Thanks, much appreciated.
Actually, a further question if I may… reading the manual for the EX2, and it says that I can create an encrypted raid volume of a given size and then use the rest of the space as spanning. What I think would come in handy would be to create multiple independent raid 1 volumes, a small encrypted one (to store sensitive data) and then a much larger unencrypted one for general stuff.
Is this possible, or if i create a smaller encrypted volume am I only able to use the remaining space in a non-raid mode?
