I tried to get my NAS up and running with a WD 2TB RED drive and a 4TB Seagate Ironwolf. I formatted both and put them in the NAS. Nothing happened and the Browser UI also didn’t shows and I also could not find the NAS on my TP-Link MESH.
I was advised by WD Support that it may be because the drives are not of the same size and so on. I know that support for this NAS was discontinued a while ago.
I bought another 4TB Seagate Ironwolf drive, exactly the same. I put them in the NAS, the brand new one I received today, without initialising or formatting it. The other drive was formatted. I also pressed the reset button on the NAS. I checked after an hour. The NAS did not register an IP address on my home network and the drives are cold to the touch … so nothing happened.
I searched on the net but couldn’t really find anything helpful about what I need to do before putting the drives in the NAS and firing it up.
Question: Do I need to initialise or format the drives? Do I need to delete the volume of the one I formatted? Why is the NAS not registering an IP address? … and so on.
I will appreciate it if someone can help me getting my NAS up and running. I have two brand new 4TB drives.
You don’t need to initialize or format the drives before putting them in a WD NAS. The NAS should take care of that on its own. Since the drives aren’t spinning up and the box isn’t showing an IP address on your network, the issue is with the NAS enclosure, not the disks. If the Ethernet port doesn’t light up and the drives stay cold, the unit isn’t booting. That could be a bad power supply, a failed board, or corrupted firmware. Try another Ethernet cable and router port, and do a full 40-second reset with the drives in place. If nothing changes, power it on without the drives. If it still doesn’t appear on your network, the box itself is most likely dead. Your new drives are fine and can be used in another NAS, but this enclosure probably won’t be usable unless it can be reflashed with new firmware.
