Adding a drive to EX4100 without losing data

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud EX Series
3

@G_Rayn,

A lot of forum moderators and WD staff are saying this should work, but as other people have said the documentation and procedures for doing this are very poorly documented or non existent. If WD have procedures for doing this, then it would be an excellent idea to share these with the community.

I for one have tried to convert a 2 disk RAID 1 to a 4 disk RAID 5 and followed what little I could find on it and it does not work. I selected the options to “Switch” the RAID mode and it went off and did something for a long time, but ultimately somehow ended up with a 4 disk RAID 1 (as per the output from “cat /proc/mdstat”). I then tried to “Expand” the drives and somehow think the NAS go into a state where it wanted to constantly swap a drive in and out of Bay 1 with no way to disable this.

In the end I was fortunate that I had another NAS that I could back up about 80% of my data to and used this as temporary storage and rebuilt the RAID from scratch. Not everyone who has this sort of device has the luxury of another temporary storage device available, especially when large capacity drives are in the picture.

Subset of other similar threads below :

and I am sure there are probably more.

Here is the thread on my own experience in trying to do this from some time ago :

Cheers,

JediNite