Using WD Reds from EX2 Ultra in Normal PC For Custom NAS?

Rocket199 · April 6

Hey folks,

I was wondering if anyone had any inside that could help me. I had a Western Digital EX2 Ultra NAS with a couple of 4tb Reds in there, I had it working as storage for the PC's in the house and media server for my other devices on the network such as phones and TV's and had no problem with phones auto backing up when they reconnected to the WiFi, life was great! Except.. after it auto installed an update as it normally would, I could no longer access the admin panel and it kept telling me my password was incorrect (I know 110% it was not) I tried contacting WD for help and they kept passing me about like a peace pipe explaining in different ways how it was in someway my fault.

So long story short, my wife has recently upgraded her PC and her old machine is still quite a capable little feller so I'm wondering if there is a way to use them in that and have that machine host its own NAS and offer the services like the WD one did. Only issue is tho, I NEED to preserve the data on those drives, they were setup as RAID 1 and there was no encryption used. I have seen on some of the YT videos things about using TrueNAS etc but nothing was discussed about using drives that had previously been in an off the shelf enclosure, I'm worried that some how there might be data loss when I plug them into a different OS.

Any thoughts? Thank you in advance!

Electronics Wizardy · April 6

You should be able to access the data on there with linux. I'd give a linux distro a shot, and see what the drives are formatted as. I'd guess that there using mdadm + ext4/xfs/btrfs if there like other nas units out here.

I'd get anouther place to copy the data for now. Your gonna want to copy the data off, then format to the system the new nas OS likes.