I want to change out my drives for larger capacity, is there a utility available to copy an old drive from a caddy onto the new drives or please outline another method for this purpose.
No utilities can do that. If your device set up a RAID 0 or JBOD, then made sure to copy the data to another devices before swap out the drives. If you use RAID 1 then just replace one drive and do a RAID rebuild, after REbuild completed replace the other drive and do a Rebuild. Finally you can do RAID 1 space expansion. HTH
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Hello Jebusx,
I have a Raid 1 setup and wanting to upsize the drives. I read both drives had to be the same size, from your reply, this is not needed or true?
So I can insert my 1Tb drive and swap out the other drive with the new 4 Tb drive, and rebuild?
then replace the 1TB drive with the second 4TB drive and rebuild again?
I am not familiar with the space expansion or even how to rebuild a Raid, pretty green here.
Dags
Yup, that’s how you do it. Let me find the manual page link for you on how to do a Rebuild and expand RAID drive size.
RAID Rebuild should be automatic or you can to it manually from the My Cloud Main menu page in the RAID tab.
Go to andrep182 on how to expand RAID 1 drive size
- get to My Cloud main menu
- click on ‘storage’
- Under ‘Raid’ tab by ‘RAID Volume’, pick ‘Change RAID Mode’
- It’ll warn you that it’ll interrupt the current services. Press ‘continue’
- Pick RAID 1 and you should see ‘Expand Capacity’ option
Why does the software tell me all my data will be lost when doing above?
|Switch to RAID 1|
||You are about to re-format the hard drive(s). All data will be erased. Do you want to continue?|
You should not get that message if you do an expansion. It looks like you are converting from JBOD or RAID 0 to a RAID 1. Maybe you should contact WD support to walk you through step by step to expand your RAID 1 capacity.
I just purchased 2 x 6 TB WD Red Plus HD to upgrade my MyCloud EX2 Ultra, currently running 2 x 2 TB WD Red HD, in RAID 1.
So, I’ll let you know very shortly if this is as simple as presented!
Thanks for sharing this, it really helped me make a decision between upgrading HD or buying a new NAS completely.
UPDATE: I want to report that this process works but I’d like to highlight a few points
- When you get to the expand dialog box, the system expects you to move the slider to the desired value (I first missed this). So, move the slider all the way to the right, if you want to use all the drive space
- Whatever your language, set the parameters to English otherwise it might truncate messages, making it difficult to know what it says.
- This process works (replace “manually” each drive, rebuild, expand) but the system would guide you to do it when you go to “change raid mode”, “expand”. The default option is to let the system tell you when to remove/insert drives 1 and then 2. I’m sure it does the exact same thing, but it is more guided.
- For 2x2TB drives, it took about 8-10 hours for each drive to rebuild. Then maybe 10-12 hours to expand in 2x6TB.
Excellent! Worked on my MyCloud EX2 Ultra.
I had 2 x 4TB in Raid 1 and wanted to replace it with 10TB.
First I turned on Auto Rebuild.
Then I shut it down, powered it off, and replaced the first disk (I do not know if it has a hot-swap feature and I do not trust it), upon being powered on, it started rebuilding the first disk automatically. After 20 hours the rebuild was complete.
Then I shut it down, powered it off, and replaced the second disk. After 16 hours the rebuild was complete.
It showed an option to create another volume with the spare space, but I followed this forum hints and clicked on Change Raid Mode, it offers two options, choose raid mode and extend volume. I checked only the second and followed the next screens.
I almost skipped past the slider, increased the slider till the end, and followed the next screens until finished.
After 27 hours, the expansion was complete and all 10TB was available in the volume.
Thank you all for the information on this thread.
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I do not get expand capacity option, I went thru other thread and some people also get it some dont.
No blue slider, nothing.
And WD support became a joke, they respond with some copy/paste template to reboot router, they will not answer your question
Similar to JonathanFR, I wanted to upgrade my MyCloud EX2 Ultra. It had 2-4 TB drives in RAID_1. Following the manual (page 100, or so) the existing drives were replaced with 2-14 TB ones including a 48 W power supply. Of course, as others have found, simply installing new higher capacity drives did not make the full storage capacity available.
With the 14 TB drives already installed, numerous posts in the forum were read, and the Storage-RAID-Change RAID Mode process was initiated. I just followed the process prompts which included removing and reinserting the new drives sequentially as requested. It all took some time, but less than 24 hours. In the end, full access to the 14 TB storage became available.
The original data on the 4 TB drives was not backed up since I still had those drives and figured they could be reinstalled if needed. Anyway, all the original files/data were preserved during the Change RAID Mode process.
It’s too bad and a bit of a mystery why WD relies completely on forum information for this. The upgrading processes is straightforward once clear instructions are available. Thankfully, the forum was a great resource for the upgrade.
Thank-you all for this information. I found the procedure useful during my own “Upgrade Drive Size” on the MyCloud EX2 Ultra.
I successfully hot-swapped secondary 1x 2TB HDD for secondary 1x 6TB HDD while the EX2 Ultra was still powered on. The EX2 Ultra is rebuilding the RAID1 volume which does take a few hours. Waiting to hot-swap & rebuild primary 1x 2TB HDD for primary 1x 6TB HDD then expand the RAID1 volume from 2TB to 6TB.
I originally had two 4TB drives installed in RAID 1. I bought two new 22TB drives to replace them so I removed one of the 4TB drive and replaced it with one of the 22TB drives and let it go. The next day it was finished rebuilding.
After that was done I installed the other new 22TB drive and this took about a day to rebuild as well.
Then I went into the browser application to expand the drive. It said it was expanding for 2 days and the lights were red so I waited but after two days it started making a clicking sound so I unplugged it.
I waited a few hours because it was pretty hot and then plugged it back in. The lights were now blue but it still said it was expanding so I waited two more days. It still says expanding. I went into the RAID section to see if there was any more information and it said remove drive 1. Well this seems odd, why would I remove drive 1? I went and did it anyway and left the app open while I did that. It said it was busy and I should wait. Then it said to insert the new drive so I put it back in. It said it was busy again and now it is showing me “Expanding Volume_1…0%”
I really hope this works because these drives are making noises now and are very hot when I remove them. It says that the fan is 0 rpm. Not sure why because they are plenty toasty.
Drive 1 temp now is 48C and drive 2 is 52C.
