Can I insert 4 SATA drives and keep what is on them and just access them? Or does this device require me to format the drives and use RAID 0 or 1?
936426
Yes you can as long as none of the drives has an operating system on them. You do not need to format or do anything to your drives. You will need a port multiplier card for eSata in order to see all 4 drives, but after that you're good to go.
936427
No you don't need to format them. At least I didn't and it reads them just like any other portable hard drive. I'm not sure how to set it up if you are planning to have a seperate operating system on them. But just for storage use, its basic plug n play.
936428
Yes as long as they were independently formatted and were previously accessible. I've done this. I had 4 usb enclosures. I pulled out the HDDs and placed them all into this enclosure, and it works on USB.
936429
You can keep your drives as is. There is no hardware RAID so it will read four drives independently.
1933542
Why would you need to do that? This is an array you would pop the bad drive out slap a new one in and it would rebuild the data on its own. The default is raid 1 but you can customize to your preference.
2235683
Using X-RAID is the only way to make that work. But you are limited to 1 volume, if you want more than 1 volume you would turn off X-RAID but you cant go back without reformatting your drives. X-RAID will manage your redundancy
2285049
I have eight 4TB drives, totaling to 32 TB's. Haven't tried 5TB drives.Do note that I'm no longer using the included RAID controller though, it had too many issues. I opted for the SANS DIGITAL HA-DAT-4ESPCIE PCI-Express x8 SATA II (3.0Gb/s) Controller Card on Newegg, had no issues with it since.I think the bus supports 64-bit address mapping, so the capacity limitation per drive is most likely a limitation of the controller and not the multiplier that's built into the SAN enclosure.
554337
For others seeking an answer to this question, the answers aren't entirely correct. Plug it in stock and the answers are correct, you will see 4 drives. But this is meant to be used for a disk array. Google "RAID Types" and you'll get explanations. You can most definitely set it up as a RAID 0 and all your drives will be shown as 1 drive but it "stripes" all your data across all the drives in the RAID with no redundancy and is not recommended due to easy data loss. But you also can most definitely use this as a JBOD and 4 drives show up. On a side note, do not waste money on DrivePool. There are RAID and Partition managers out there that do a way better job for free. For others seeking an answer to this question, the answers aren't entirely correct. Plug it in stock and the answers are correct, you will see 4 drives. But this is meant to be used for a disk array. Google "RAID Types" and you'll get explanations. You can most definitely set it up as a RAID 0 and all your drives will be shown as 1 drive but it "stripes" all your data across all the drives in the RAID with no redundancy and is not recommended due to easy data loss. But you also can most definitely use this as a JBOD and 4 drives show up. On a side note, do not waste... » Read More For others seeking an answer to this question, the answers aren't entirely correct. Plug it in stock and the answers are correct, you will see 4 drives. But this is meant to be used for a disk array. Google "RAID Types" and you'll get explanations. You can most definitely set it up as a RAID 0 and all your drives will be shown as 1 drive but it "stripes" all your data across all the drives in the RAID with no redundancy and is not recommended due to easy data loss. But you also can most definitely use this as a JBOD and 4 drives show up. On a side note, do not waste money on DrivePool. There are RAID and Partition managers out there that do a way better job for free. « Show Less
1787152
Yes. RAID 0 will give you 4 GB of NAS storage with no protection. RAID 1 is with mirrored drives where if one drive fails you still have your data on the other drive. Only 2 GB of storage with RAID 1
1902579
Hi, yes indeed, as well as being a raid 0, 1, 5 unit this product is also a very competent JBOD (just a bunch of discs) that interfaces with your via a decent USB 3.0 port. It very (too) easily switches between those storage configurations; just don't make the mistake of switching before you've backed up your data!!
1267398
I have 8 of these NAS drives in a non-RAID case. They are all setup as individual drives. I move them from one computer to the next with no problems.
1895544
If you bought the one with pre-installed hard drives, out of the box it will be RAID-1 (mirrored) with 4TB of available storage. You can undo the formatting and redo it as two separate 4TB drives for a total of 8TB of storage, but then you lose all of the protection the mirror provides.
1239947
With the Synology RAID option you can start with the 3TB drives and add larger ones later. You just can't anything of smaller size than the drives used to create the array.
593836
Hi, that depends on the configuration of your drives, if it raid 0,1 or 5, then it should see as a single drive, else, it wont be possible to see all the drives
2138930
I just wanted to add that RAID 1 means 2 3TB drives will show up as 3TB (not 6TB) as it is a "mirrored" solution (and what I would recommend). So the MAX capacity in that set up is 4TB.
539946
I believe once you change to flex-raid you can setup the drives however you would like. If you have 4 drives you can use raid 1 for two drive and leave the others drives as raid 0
1170960
In the past RAID has been a hardware supported function. I don't use this in a RAID setup as I only have two drives in it so far. You should view this as four separate USB to SATA bridges. Any RAID function you want to use will have to be 100% software implemented.
2095134
I have Sata II WD Black drives in mine. However I would suggest a different Raid bay. This one has its own raid card and it works intermittently. There is a lack of support for the card and its very cumbersome.
735279
I'm only using the one drive it came with right now. It might have software raid. You can ask the seller via their support link at deepdiscountservers.com.
800516
Can you run RAID that way? Id like to install 2 2TB drives, for large capacity RAID.