Can I go from 2 disks to one disk?

My Cloud OS 5 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud EX Series
1

I have an EX2 Ultra that is serving as the media server for my home. It has two 12TB drives striped Raid 1.

Recently one of the drives was reported as bad - after only about 18 months of operation, which is surprising, but I guess these things happen. I have already opened a support case, and after a ridiculous amount of hoop-jumping, I finally have an RMA. However, they won’t ship the good drive until the bad drive is received by the warehouse, and even then it will take “3-5 business days.” As a result of all this, real world I expect it to be 10-14 calendar days before I have the replacement drive.

My questions:

  1. Can I run the unit with only a single drive? My understanding of Raid 1 is that one drive simply mirrors the data on the other drive, so since I don’t need to worry about what file is stored on what drive like I would with Raid 0 it should be okay, right? Or will the fact that it expects 2 drives and only sees 1 create an operational issue?

  2. Anyone have any idea how long I can expect the rebuild to take once I get the new drive inserted? Is it reasonable to assume that the NAS will not be usable during this time, or can I start using it right away since the “rebuild” process is just a mirroring?

Thanks for any and all insights.

3

A big part of the reason I’m running this as Raid 1 is that I don’t have an extra 12TB of space laying around on which to create said backup…

5

At work at the moment. won’t be able to attempt the above until tonight.

6

yeah - - - bummer.

I will echo Raid 1 is a tool; can be part of your data storage strategy. . .but there MANY single-mode failure possibilities that can wipe all the data.