Our family has had a DL2100 for years. We love it. It has 2 4TB drives in RAID 0 and is now full (7.76TB). I bought two 18TB drives to replace the two old drives, planning to set them to RAID 1 proper. How do I copy/rebuild the data from the two old drives onto the new drive(s)? Intuitively I thought that simply putting in a new drive in the bay would initiate a “copy drive” function from the WDMyCloud2100 dashboard, but of course not. The good news was that the new drives were both detected and healthy. How do I copy the old 4TB drives (one at a time) that were RAID 0 and rebuild the data onto one of the new drives and then set them up for RAID 1?
Raid 0 - - > Drive spanning (and stripping)
Raid 1 - - → Drive mirroring
In Raid 0 - - > Lose one drive; you lose ALL DATA
In Raid 1 - - > Lose one drive - - > No sweat - → All the data is still on the other drive.
The good news is you have not lost any data - - > yet.
The bad news is that you can’t copy the data directly on to the new drives (because. . . you know. . .raid 0 has no redundancy)
Step One: Return the original drives to the box
Easy way #1:
- Buy an external 8 TB external drive.
- Copy all data to external drive; then swap out old drives for new drives.
- Upon installation of new drives; configure for Raid 1
- THEN copy data back.
Easy way #2 (what I would do):
- Buy another 2 bay NAS box (any brand)
- Install new 18TB drives into the new box. Copy data from NAS “Old” to NAS “New” - - - → (Or don’t copy! - - > The old NAS is still running!)
- If you only have the data on one NAS; Buy an external drive anyway and make a backup!
Easy way#3
- Backup the data to an external drive. I would NOT do the following without a backup!!
- Buy a 4 bay WD box
- Install OLD Drives (both). The NAS SHOULD recognize the old drives (as raid roaming).
- Install NEW drives. You can configure them a single RAID1 volume, then do as you like. (this produces a Volume1: 8TB; and Volume2: 18TB.)
There is a theme - - > Your existing data is vulnerable, because it is in a Raid0 setup with aged HDD’s. You need a backup!!!
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Thank you very much for the response! Sorry for not getting back sooner…flu, finals, etc. Pretty much what I had expected. Sigh. My fault for the initial setup. Ended up grabbing an 8TB for my oldest’s pc (huge steam library). Used it to transfer everything back and forth. Installed my new 18TB drives and setup RAID1. Used the older two 4TB drives for an NVR, also in RAID1. Finally have some redundancy. Thanks again for taking the time to write up the great response. I literally got nothing from any other forum or subreddit.
You might want to read the folowing thread before putting too much faith in the DL2100.
The DL4100 and DL2100 tend to die with zero warning due to an Intel Atom CPU hardware flaw.
