WD PR4100 - Can the HDD be removed and read on a PC?

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud Pro Series
1

HI, I’m considering buying a WD PR4100 NAS box, but I have several questions:
Are the hard drives encrypted, if so can the encryption be turned off?
Is it possible to remove the hard drives and read their data on a PC in case the NAS box dies?

Thank you.

2

You can read the disks on any system with gdisk, mdadm and ext4 support (e.g. Ubuntu or mac). Or import them in another WD My Cloud NAS.
Encryption is optional, not enabled by default.

3

Just to follow up here, assuming I have two drives that were configured as a RAID stripe under PR4100, once I have them physically connected to my Mac, what do I need to do in order to mount them in their striped configuration and read their data?

4 
sudo mdadm --assemble --scan
cat /proc/mdstat
5

Thanks again, @Tfl - I don’t actually seem to have mdadm available on my Mac, were you suggesting installing a Linux distro on Mac hardware, or do you know of a source for macOS mdadm?

6

An Ubuntu live iso will do fine. I don’t have any Mac hardware, not sure if the DiskUtility can import the disks… But you can simply test this if there’s no critical data on the disks yet.
It’s always recommended to test your backup strategy before you actually need it.

7

Thanks again, @Tfl, I’ll dig out an old PC to do some experimentation with a live CD (or rather, a bootable USB drive), as the Mac’s bootable media requirements are a bit of a PITA.

8

Another option is to create an Ubuntu VM and pass through the disks. You’ll have to figure this out on your own though.