What if the internal drive was removed?

If the internal drive removed, and I connect 4 USB 3.0 drives with a hub to the USB in the back. Will the app/software still run and the unit without the hard drive still serve as a bridge between USB drives and home intranet and cloud? I don’t care about the data because they will be sync to other WD drives.

Thank you for your answers
Larry

Probably not. The internal hard drive of the My Cloud contains the firmware used to run the My Cloud hardware. The hardware boots that firmware from the hard drive when the unit is powered on. It is that firmware which then mounts a USB hard drive that is attached to the My Cloud USB port.

Thank you Bennor, so do you think replacing a WD Red (any size) will fix the problem? or simply replace the unit lol?

What “problem” are you having that would necessitate replacing the My Cloud hard drive?

If the internal hard drive in the My Cloud enclosure has died or become damaged there are various “unbricking” methods that can be used to properly configure a replacement hard drive to run within the My Cloud enclosure. One can do a forum search (magnifying glass icon upper right) and search for “unbrick” to find a number of unbricking threads.

The steps I used when replacing (more than once) the hard drive within a v3x/v4.x single bay My Cloud can be found in the following post:

https://community.wd.com/t/unbrick-then-firmware-upgrade-equals-no-dashboard/136666/6