Can this drive be used as an external drive in a non-NAS set up?
189561
As external you need an enclosure, anyone, recommend USB 3.0 or Gibabit connection for best performance. It can be used internally too.
873761
Yes you can do that (that is what I do) but I suggest you buy the DS213j, the newer version of this. It has more RAM, a newer CPU, and floating-point and it is cheaper! You can attach two external drives or a powered hub with, I believe up to seven devices total.
729022
You can use this as a PC hard drive (non-NAS use), however, these drives were created for reliability not performance. You would be better off using WD's Blue, or WD Black drive for your PC.
1140078
Yes, you can set up the HDD as mapped drives under Windows using the web administration. It's easy. I have both mounted HDD and a third drive that's USB connected to that port as well, giving three overall drives per dock. I use this set up in addition to my NAS since it's so easy to remove the HDD and use it as a portable, while the NAS uses internal 3.5" drives.
1688459
No, it can work in as standard desktop drive. Being designed for NAS though means it will tolerate being in close proximity to a lot of other disks, for both heat dispersion and resistance to vibrations caused by the other drives. You may be able to get a drive that has better overall performance and a larger cache in a non-NAS version for the same or lower price.
1300888
Yes. I did exactly that when I purchased my Synology NAS. The BlackArmor NAS was a piece of crap, but the drives are fine and the Syno. NAS will play well with them.
1449903
Yes you can if it connects by USB. You can also connect over a network if the drive is shared and skip the wires.
259040
Sorry...don't know. I only have a Synology NAS, so no experience on the external USB HDs
1628942
It isn't a NAS box; no Ethernet, no file services that I am aware of. It's as esata or USB housing for four drives. Mine is USB connected to a synology NAS box and exposes each of the four drives inside as a separate device to the synology nas head which then makes those available on the network via smb, nfs, etc. am pretty sure this box will work when USB connected to OS X. I have used other devices with the same innards as this one with OS X successfully. This box may also concatenate drives (make four 2 tb drives look like 1 8 tab drive) but I wouldn't recommend using that feature; lose one of the four drives and all your data is lost.
110293
No This is not a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device, unless your router has a USB Port for external storage this will not work.
110294
Yes, depending on your setup. It is a hardware raid, so that means that you can set it up so that whichever device you plug it into will just see it as a large hard drive. It really depends on the router. What this device can't do is act as it's own NAS--you essentially just need to think of this device as a large USB hard drive, and then find a solution that works with it.
874206
If you want to use it as an external drive, you can get an enclosure for it. Here's an example of what I mean: http://www.amazon.com/ORICO-2588US3-External-Enclosure-Support/dp/B00FYKRI9M/
1267395
Yes, but since its optimized for NAS, it will be somewhat slower than a desktop optimized drive.
1609634
You can do that but the drive rebuilding process takes a long time and this unit isn't hot-swappalbe so you would have to shut down and open the case. You can attach external drives and back up files to them.
103520
Yes, treat it as a standard removable usb drive, don't run the "backup" software.
228614
The diskless NAS does not have any drives installed in it. I bought the diskless thinking I would use the four matched drives I had in an existing server. That would have been perfect, but the drives were not supported by the EX4. If you have existing drives, and they are on the WD EX4 supported list, this would be a great way to make use of them. Otherwise, you might as well purchase with disks and have a single warranty covering the entire NAS and drives.
475147
If you buy cheap externals like I did yes but it will also force your RAID into read only. If you spend the extra on NAS drives then you're fine. It's not the enclosure that dictates that but the firmware on the drives themselves.