Upgrade Disks on My Cloud EX2

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

I see that this question was posted earlier by someone else but no relevant answer was provided. I would like to know if it is possible to upgrade the Hard Disks used in MyCloud EX2 NAS.

Currently I am running 2x4TB drives in Raid - Mirroring. If I want to upgrade the drives to 8TBx2, can I just break the Raid, install one new disk and copy the data over and then install the 2nd disk and re-enable mirroring.

Regards
Praveen

2

The EX2 enclosure can only support drives up to 6TB in size. To use 8 or 10TB drives, you would need the EX2 Ultra enclosure. Rules of RAID apply when swapping out drives. The RAID will only create a volume reading the smallest drive in the RAID. If you take out one of the two 4TB drives and add a 6TB drive, it will create a RAID 1 mirror as if you still had two 4TB drives and you would lose 2TB of space. You would have to replace both drives at the same time and create a new RAID to get the most capacity available.

3

thanks for your reply. So I have some questions

In order to transfer the data from the existing 4 TB to 6 TB RAID can I do the following:

  1. Break the Raid and convert to JBOD - Will this cause me to loose data?
  2. Insert just one 6 TB drive and copy the data from the 4 TB disk to 6 TB disk
  3. Insert the 2nd 6 TB drive and re-enable Mirroring and let the Raid rebuild

Another question :
Does the PR4100 My Cloud Pro support 8Tb drives?

4

In answer to your questions:

5

In answer to your questions:

  1. Break the Raid and convert to JBOD - Will this cause me to loose data?
    Yes, any change in RAID will result in lost data.
  2. Insert just one 6 TB drive and copy the data from the 4 TB disk to 6 TB disk
    Copying the data would not work since you would lose the data on the 6TB when you create a new mirror
  3. Insert the 2nd 6 TB drive and re-enable Mirroring and let the Raid rebuild
    The rebuild would work but again, you would lose 3TB of space permanently
    Another question :
    Does the PR4100 My Cloud Pro support 8Tb drives?
    YES
6

Thanks for your reply. So what is the option to upgrade the storage from 4 TB to 6 TB?

Or is it possible to break the mirror and change to Disk Spanning across the 2 4 TB drives without loosing data.

7

If you upgrade, you need to upgrade both drives at the same time. As I said before, any change to the RAID will result in data loss when the new RAID is created. You can’t change from mirror to spanning without the drives being reformatted.

8

So! Since no one actually ever answered this question… For a second time it was asked.

Let me try to re-ignite this topic.

We have established you can upgrade the drives from 2x4TB to higher ones.

Now what? Specifically, once you have the two new higher capacity drives up and running in the device, how do you get all the data from the old drives to the new drives? The old drives are formatted in WD NAS format, so they can’t be read in windows to simply copy everything back over the network. I even tried plugging my old drive in to a USB caddy and using the USB ports in the back of the WD NAS. It recognized the drive, but can’t access the data on it.

Short of putting the old drives back in to the device, and copying everything over the network to another device (Which I don’t have, by the way. At least not with 4TB of free space to just sling around), then put the new drives back in. And copy everything back over to the new drives, SLOWLY over the network again.

Now that I have my new 8TB drives in the NAS working. I want to plug the old 4TB drive in to something, and just copy the data back over to the new 8TB drives in one single swoop, instead of swapping back and forth and copying over the network 4 times.

9

Hello,
Since I have the same problem it would expect a procedure
How can I read the small disk on other machine?

10

Trying to read thru the posts from the different times to understand the open question… If you are asking whether you can take the HDDs out from the NAS and just connect it to a PC via SATA or USB to mount and get the data out, the answer is no. The HDDs in the NAS are RAID-ed and with ext4 file system.

11

That was the question. ok.

Also I understand that resizing Raid 1 is not possible.

The data must be copied in a third drive And copied back on the new bigger Raid.

12

My path would be to use an external enclosure and drive (I happen to have a couple) if needed to copy the data on the RAID to the external drive, then install the new drives, format them as a RAID, and copy the old info the the new RAID. Not the most techie solution, and involves a third drive, but it would work.

And if you have a desktop you can work with, you could just mount the third drive with a cable and avoid an external enclosure.

13

OK, so I want to replace my 3 TB x 2 raid 1 pair with 6 TB x 2 raid 1 pair. Could I:

  1. pull one of the existing 3 TB drives, reformat it for windows and then copy the data from the other 3 TB drive to the windows 3 TB drive.
  2. install the two 6 TB drives, build a raid 1 array.
  3. copy the data back from the “windows” drive to the Mycloud EX2.
    ???
    Other option, can I read a single volume of the 3TB raid 1 array on a Linux boot?
14

You know what I ended up doing is getting an ULTRA put the larger drives in it and create a separate raid. then copied everything from the EX2 to the ULTRA.
Over kill , but it worked.