Great info THANK YOU.
I have a EX2 Ultra.
I swapped out the stock 2 TB drives with two 10 TB Red Drives.
Using it for my Plex music streaming of my FLAC music collection and
personal docs/data/photo backups.
Hi, I have a question, I mistakenly bought the My Cloud EX2 Ultra to replace My Book Duo and I didnāt know I wouldnāt be able to use it as a external drive as well for my light room work. Do you have any experience pulling these drive out and placing them into another enclosure and being able to reformate them to be used as usb external drives? I donāt have anything saved on the drives so thereās no worry of losing information.
These should be standard WD Red drives (probably Red Plus). You should be able to just yank 'em and put them in a USB drive enclosure. Plug into a PC, and āformatā.
Real question: WHY?
If itās not what you want. . . can you return it?
If not. . .as a NAS, the EX2 Ultra is a swank little unit (if a bit obsolete with OS/3). Plug it into a router, and it can be used just like a USB hard drive. . .but accessible by every computer on your network.
Plus it can serve a media server using standard DLNA and programs like Plex.
If you are a privacy nut (like me) donāt enable cloud access and donāt upgrade to OS/5.
One why is because I trashed all the packaging so I cant return
The bigger why is because I cant use it like a usb drive with Lightroom, Lightroom does not allow the use of a network drive. Apparently from what I read the usb on the my cloud ex2 ultra enclosure is host only? so they donāt work like a typical usb connection.
I mostly use my externals for photo and video editing work and archiving work. Since I mostly use Lightroom this enclosure isnāt working for me unless thereās another way to configure.
I might try to just sell it local and get something else. Iām also thinking of going to a different manufacturer since it seems difficult and problematic when these enclosures fail (which my other my book duo starting to do hence this purchase) because of the encryption.
If anyone has thoughts on using these with Lightroom let me know.
Huh. . . I use Lightroom (V6; with perpetual license) all the time. I did not realize that it did not like using network drives (what a silly restriction - - I bet they are concerned about network latency)
I actually use lightroom with a USB drive myself. . . .so I know where you are coming from. I use the NAS for backup of both the image files and the catalogues.
A suggestion - donāt know if it will work -slick if it does - have the catalogue on your PC/Laptop HDD and the image files on the network drive.
FYI: I gave up on lightroom when they went to the subscription model. I used the perpetually licensed V6 until I got a new camera at the first of the year; then switched to Capture One (with perpetual license) and have not looked back.
It is a silly restriction. I had no idea.
Thatās a good idea, I will try that.
Oh same, I hate the adobe subscription models. Iām still using cs6 suite and Lightroom 4. Iām so paranoid about losing these I limit my windows updates as Iāve had issues in the past with minor updates that arenāt security related doing weird dumb things to some of my software.
Thanks for the input
I currently have 2 EX2 Ultras and 1 old EX2 all configured as Raid 1 with 2 x 4tb HDD. I want to take the existing 2 x 4tb drives from my old EX2 NAS and put them in a new EX2 Ultra as the EX2 does not have OS5. Can I just move the 2 x 4tb drives across to the new EX2 ultra with OS5 without data loss and have the new EX2 Ultra figure it out automatically ? Thanks, Mike
Always back up your dataā¦ i.e. make a copy of the dataā¦
In theory that is what data migration should doā¦ moving from one OS to a newer oneā¦
but this is WD and ā¦ it may or may not workā¦ depending on the age of the programmersā¦
Since nobody has tried thisā¦ or at least nobody that has tried this and posted about itā¦ the onus is on you to tell us how successful you wereā¦
let us knowā¦
Thanks for the reply, Iām surprised this hasnāt come up previously as Iām sure some users have replaced an EX2 for an EX2 Ultra whether as an upgrade like me or perhaps their EX2 mother board died.
Iāve been copying the archived data to a spare 3 TB HDD for the past 10 hours and have another 6 hours to go in case it doesnāt work. Iāll post a reply again in the next day or two to let people know if it works or not by just swapping the 2 x 4tb HDD to my new EX2 Ultra when it arrives. I see no reason why it shouldnāt as Windows is backwards compatible for HDDās but this being Linux based and obviously customized by WD, Iām wary.
I did notice in passing that 4TB drives are still probably the best bang for your buck per terabyte despite 6, 8, 10 and 12 TB being available but the 8TB and up cost more per terabyte and Iād be putting my archives at greater risk in event of a failure which would take longer to recover over 4TB even with the EX2 Ultra higher speeds. Mike
An update to moving 2 x 4TB raid 1 drives from a EX2 NAS to a EX2 Ultra NAS -
It worked flawlessly and as far as I can tell the archived data on the two HDDās remained intact.
The new EX2 Ulra OS5 software spent around 10 minutes doing whatever it was doing to use the old drives but it left the shares alone. The only maintenance needed was allowing the latest software update to take place, enter my preferred password for access and change to a fixed IP address which I prefer to the default DHCP setting. The 1 TB attached external USB from the old EX2 was mounted automatically as well.
As Raphael suggested and I had already done, Iād still advise backing up the EX2 shares on another device just as a precaution.
2 Likes
@Ralphael do you have enough info to answer the following question?
Q. Can I transfer the disks from a My Could Mirror Gen 1 enclosure to another My Cloud Mirror EX2 Ultra enclosure?
Just passing here to say āThank Youā!
The best and honest post I saw here!
I do not have enough info and even if I do, you have to remember that these NAS enclosures are programmed by the new gen kids which means that even if it does work the answer is always maybe.
-
Soā¦ go ahead and buy some nice 18tb easystore USB 3,.0 from somewhere that allows HD returns and back up your data to them. Maybe even buy two 18tb easystore so you have two copies of your data.
-
now go ahead and transfer the disks from a My Cloud Mirror Gen1 enclosure to a My Cloud Mirror EX2 Ultra enclosureā¦ and follow any prompts that the enclosure may generate.
-
last step. Let us know how it went. As a forewarning though, Always backup your data before transferring your disks to another enclosure even if you know that it works. It is murphyās law that when you donāt have a backup, that is when something doesnāt work. When you have backup, everything works like it should.
Good luck!!
Most appreciated!!! you are welcome!
Thank You for taking the time to write this, I am very stupid when it comes to technoledge. I have two units now one being my cloud EX2 and the new one my cloud EX2 Ulta. I have installed my new EX2 Ultra and now canāt see my EX2 and need to get the data off my EX2 onto my EX2 Ulta. It is unclear to me if I need to install one of my mirrored drives out of my EX2 into the Ultra or the other way around? Then I donāt know how to get the data off the drive.
Mike200, this dialog for changing from EX2 to EX2Ultra was reassuring as I am about to do the same as a result of the support loss to EX2. Aruss
I have a failed My Cloud Home NAS. The data is on a 6tb WD Red drive. All my files are ex2. If I purchase a Western Digital WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra 2-Bay 8TB can I simply swap out one of the drives for the one I have removed from the My Cloud Home and access my files?
Short answer: NO
Longer Answer: MyCloud Home: That puppy is running different hardware AND different software than an EX2 Ultra. (I believe the āHomeā stuff runs android software; MyCloud software is customized Linux)
So therefore; I very, very strongly doubt the drive volumes will be interchangeable. You need to go to the MyCloud HOME sub-forum to see help there. I bet it will involve shucking the drive; and hooking it up to a PC to read off the data.
This is great information. I still have a big question: If it says the drive is bad what does that mean for your data? Here is my scenarioā¦It said drive 1 was bad so I ordered a new drive and inserted in bay 1. Then I initiated a rebuild. Sometime during the rebuild it tells me drive 2 is bad. So at this point I am concerned if I just throw another drive in there the previous rebuild did not complete and Disk 1 will not contain 100% of my data. Why are there no utilities for data validation or file count etc? What should I do now?
On another topic. I had an enclosure fail completely and I was able to recover the data off of the disk by putting in a USB enclosure and using a NAS recovery utility on my PC. I do not remember which one I used but it is good to know it is possible and your data is not lost forever if your enclosure fails.
Before rebuilding any driveā¦ a failure of one drive will still allow you to copy all the data off the deviceā¦ so if it is not too lateā¦ copy the data before doing anything.
even if it is rebuilding, I think you can still copy the data out. Do soā¦
Good to hearā¦
