Hi,
I have been running a White Light MBWE 2TB edition in RAID 1 (so for clarity, 1TB RAID capacity) for some time and am very happy with it.
Reading around the forum it occurred to me that the one data security risk I didn't have covered was failure of the housing itself. I may be wrong, but I got the feeling I would have trouble putting the HDDs in another (non-MBWE) housing and being able to use the drives straight off.
To cover this I bought a second identical MBWE housing on ebay. The theory is if my current MBWE housing fails, I can just remove the HDDs as a pair from the faulty one, slot them in the second housing, and start it up. I've not needed to test that theory yet. However…
I'd now quite like to commission the second housing as another NAS with larger, maybe 4TB, drives. If I can do this I'll probably move all the data onto the larger NAS and then keep the original as a spare housing, as per the plan above. I'm not sure this is possible but here goes. The plan is as below:
[To make this easier I'll refer to the four HDDs as 1A, 1B (these are the 1TB drives in the current NAS), and 4A and 4B (these are 2 new 4TB drives I need to buy)]
1. purchase 2 off matching 4TB drives (4A and 4B).
2. remove 1A from current NAS and insert in new NAS with 4B.
3. boot new NAS, login to it, and rebuild RAID as per WD instructions using NAS software using 1A as data source.
4. remove 1A from new NAS and replace in old NAS.
5. boot old NAS and confirm all ok, rebuild RAID if required using 1B as data source.
6. insert 4A in new NAS and boot, login to it and rebuild RAID as per WD instructions using NAS software using 4B as data source.
7. erase all data on new NAS and format drives from scratch, hoping this gives a 4TB capacity.
Once I'm past step 5 and I'm happy the data is OK, I can fiddle with the second NAS, and the drives in it, all I want.
I figure step 6 may not be required. The reason for rebuilding the RAID in the new NAS in step 3 is basically just to get the OS onto the drive 4B. Once it is there I may be able to format the drives without rebuilding the RAID (again) on the new NAS.
If this isn't possible with larger drives, presumably it would work with 1TB drives instead of 4TB to give a second NAS, but I would like to increase capacity.
I don't know if this has been tried as a process, but I would like to hear from anyone who has tried this, if it worked or not.
I have two spare HDDs that I can use to test the above, but they are hardly matching, a 1TB and an 80GB. I could use these to test up to step 3 at least yo avoid possibly wasting the cost of 2 x 4TB drives.
Thanks,
Ken
