Hi!
I’m in need for some advice: I was thinking of buying a WD my cloud 3TB (with fixed disks) so I can share my files between a usb2.0-era-PC and a usb2.0-era-mac without having to plug/unplug drives, when I saw that EX2 ultra was at around the same price. Since I have a few 500GB/1TB drives lying around, I thought I could retrofit a couple of them for now and in the future replace them one by one with some newer and bigger WD Red drive (as needs grow and money allows) making thus my steps painlessly into the world on NAS.
I’ve got 2 greens (WD10EAVS, WD10EVDS), one black (WD1001FALS) and one seagate barracuda, and a few more 1TB and 500GB ones inside computers that I am in the process of throwing out. Most are 5-6 years old though. I know it won’t be long before I will need to throw them away, but I’d like to squeeze their juice as much as I can, since storage is useful 
In other words, I’m not looking for best reliability - merely for a way to make use of my spare drives and in a more posh way compared to my horrible 20$ USB2.0 SATA dock that I’ve been plugging back-and-forth thus far…
Are these drives expected to function? I’ve seen that there is a rather short compatibility list of supported 3.5" drives but none of my drives is on it; does that mean that none of these will work, or simply that they have not been tested “but usually drives do work, since… you know… they are all… SATA”?
- I don’t expect anybody to vouch for a particular model’s compatibility (unless he/she has tested it himself), but what is the general trend? The NAS being picky and ignoring unlisted drives? The NAS killing the drive? Or the drive working even though it’s not on the list? (hope it’s the last one)
- If I install one drive and leave the 2nd bay empty would it work?
- If I had different drives (models) in the two bays would it complain (JBOD mode)?
I suppose that if I can’t get it to work with any of my drives, then this NAS is not for me 
Thank you all for your time, I hope I didn’t get you tired with the lengthy message!
-Fotis
