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Forum Discussion
WD Compatibility
Two questions: 1. I have two WD Elements and one WD My Book. I did a brief search for compatibile drives with the 104 and only came up with about three for WD. Is that right or was I looking i...
I might be building a desktop later this year. I think I'll just try putting the externals in that (removing them from their enclosures, of course) and have a 4 drive PC. I'll keep back ups on actual external hard drives though. Cleans up clutter, puts them on a dedicated machine that will go be turned on and off and have very few programs, so playback and navigation shouldn't be a problem. Also will be hardlined to the router so that should improve network streaming.
I'm reading between the lines here, but it sounds like you intend to keep the contents of the drives intact. If you were to move them into a NAS (any NAS, not just a ReadyNAS), they will be reformatted and you will lose all the data.
Whether the ReadyNAS goes into sleep mode is fully configurable.
While the NAS could serve as a host for the USB drives via the USB ports, that is not its best use unless you are also using (much faster) internal drives. You must have at least one internal drive, as was already mentioned. Google "USB NAS" for some better (and cheaper) options if all you want is network access to USB drives without keeping a computer on..
"USB RAID Enclosure" is another search term you can use.
Though if you go with RAID (as opposed to JBOD) you will still end up reformatting the disks.
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