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Forum Discussion
RN104 connection to PC
I have four hard drives that are listed as compatible. All are 2TB, 1.5TB and 1TB and none of them work. It keeps giving me an error that the disks are dirty and previously used, requiring a format. I connect these disks directly to my PC using other means and don't require a format. I'm using the caddy via ethernet directly to my PC and using Raidar to detect them. But not one hard drive works. I don't want to format them. Why can the PC detect them and the NAS system can't?
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The NAS needs to format the disks to use them. We wipe the disks, partition them, put the OS on the disks and the data volume.
You will need to backup the data off the disks first.
Then I would delete the partitions off the disks using your PC and put them in the NAS.
Better yet would be to get some new disks e.g. WD RED 2TB WD20EFRX or SeaGate NAS 2TB ST2000VN000 and use those.NAS uses a LINUX internal File System & PC uses NTFS as its file System .
In case your intention is the data in the drive to be read by NAS as it is & should not format the content , You should not insert the drives in to your NAS SATA porst but you will have to connect the SATA drive on a SATA to USB converter casing & connect to the NAS USB 3.0 / 2.0 port . It will show up as a SMB Share which you can access and copy .
BTW to do the above steps , NAS needs atleast one Blank Drive to Load its OS and boot . If a used disk is inserted , NAS will show up as Dirty Disk (Used Disk) . You will have to Manually format the same using Raidar . PLS NOTE , ALL DATA WILL BE ERASED AND CANNOT BE RECOVERED . Find a Blank disk or disk which you can fully format to boot up the NAS .
Thanks for your answers. Not the product I was looking for. I can connect my hard drives to the usb port on the router to do the same as this box. Drobo is better as you only need to format the first hard drive you insert to do the initial setup. Either way I can just buy a Vantec HX4 and connect it to my router and won't have to format any drives.
The performance of USB disks connected to a router likely won't be as good as a proper NAS.
Whether a router would properly detect the drives in the Vantec HX4 or not, is another question. You may/may not find that works.
In the ReadyNAS we use software RAID, have a partition on the disks for the OS, as well one for the data volume.
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