Hi, I currently have two external Western Digital drives (2TB & 4TB) and need more space and need my data on one drive. I initially looked at the My Cloud EX2 8TB but after reading some reviews I'm wondering if it'd be worth going for a drive that can be expanded... Perhaps maybe a 4 bay NAS drive. At this point I'm happy to have my data stored across multiple drives acting as one (RAID 0) with the potential to have a backup mirror drive in the future. So my question and requirements: - What's a good NAS drive that has 4 bays that can go up to 12TB and is reasonably priced? To get up to 8TB I don't really want to go over £400. - For the time being could I buy a diskless NAS and use the hard drives in the existing WD drives in the bays? Or do the drives need to be identical (model and size) if they're going to be part of a RAID? - I'm on a Mac so would have to be Mac compatible first and foremost. Thanks for your help and sorry if this post makes me sound like a noob. Steve
Do you have a budget in mind? If you're doing any RAID array, it is ideal to have identically sized drives for starters. You can mix and match sizes, but outside of envoking JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks), RAID bases the array off the smallest drive. For example, RAID 1 is an array type you'd likely consider, which would write the data to both drives at the same time leaving you with an instant backup. If you have 2 3TB drives, you will have a maximum space of 3TB. If you run 1 TB and 1 3TB drive, you are limited to 1TB total. If you were to use RAID 0 (striping), you would get 2x the smallest drive, 2TB in line with the RAID 1 example.
