How to add a second hard drive with EX2Ultra in JBOD?

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

I’ve had a EX2-Ultra for about a year, wanted to add a second hard drive. Thought it would be pretty simple as I have replaced hard drives in older dual drive MyCloud NAS drives without issue. I figured when I wanted to, I could just add a second hard drive, or if I had 2 at some point and 1 failed, I could just easily hot swap the defective drive out with a new one.

However it seems seems like the WD NAS software automatically formats both hard drives when you add a second hard drive. If you add a new second hard drive and select JBOD and check the check mark to add a second volume, it ends up formatting both hard drives. It seems like if you don’t have an extra external hard drive with the data fully backed up, you are SOL, plus you have to transfer all that data all the way back to the newly wiped drive.

Is there a way to preserve the data on existing drives when installing a second drive to a EX2 Ultra or is it always going to result in a full wipe? Thanks!

2

Hi @daclubhouse,

Please refer to the article 2 and 4 Bay Internal Drive Replacement for WD My Cloud:

Please contact the WD Technical Support team for best assistance and troubleshooting:https://support-en.wd.com/app/ask

3

In the instructions for EX2, it says

"1. Click Finish to initiate the partition and reformat the drives as shown below

  1. A new dialog box will display the volume formatting progress as shown below"

So basically what you are saying is you have to reformat every hard drive in the NAS whenever you replace or add any individual drives.

Seems like a terrible system.

4

Do you feel lucky?

Try this:

Disk 1 = Existing JBOD disk
Disk 2 = New disk, which you plan to install as a second, independent JBOD volume.

Step 1: BACKUP disk 1 to an external drive. (ALWAYS do this)
Step 2: REMOVE disk 1 :slight_smile:
Step 3: INSTALL disk 2
Step 4: Format disk2 as a JBOD volume.
Step 5: RE-INSTALL Disk 1.
Step 6: Pray.
Step 7: The system should recognize the new disk as a “roaming” raid volume. Somewhere in the menus, you should be able to “import roaming volume”. Do that.

I have NO Idea if this will work.

5

This is works! But I recommed do backup anyway.

Step 5: RE-INSTALL Disk 1 → NAS says “detect disk from another ex2 ultra. Integrate it?”
And after integration old disk fully visible nothing lost

Spent time for backup but not need to copy backup to formated disk