When using this in JBOD mode, can I install drives previously formatted NTFS, install in the drive bays &amp; access data on them without reformatting?
1254727
Yes you can! Simply leave the unit in JBOD mode and install any drives to access them. The drives will not be reformatted or overwritten. Please let us know if you have further questions. Oyen Digital Support
2234027
No u have to format.. partition.. and load Windows 7..if it's a new drive u have to do a fresh install..
1875497
read is ok, but now it can't write to ntfs hard drivers. for fat format, read and write are all ok.
1819096
Both NTFS and Fat 32 formatted discs or USB sticks are supported. Cheers! Marty G
980276
As the others have said, it's just like hooking it up inside your computer as far as that goes. You can do the same things you could if it were installed as a permanent HDD, including formatting.
1476795
Not really. You would have to format the existing drives when you added the new ones. What you're describing *might* be possible if you used the JBOD (just a bunch of disks) configuration, but not for any RAID. For all their RAID configs, you have to choose the number and size of disks at creation, and you can't change it without reformatting.
1467436
Yes. You'll have to go to the WD website to get.instructions on how to format it using Disk Utility. Not hard, but not plug and play.Hope this helps. Cheers,Steve
1573880
No. Simply plug in the drive and start copying files. It may be necessary to reformat the drive depending on your preferred file system (I reformat to "HFS+" for my Mac), but you absolutely do not to install software to use this. I believe both Judith and Vitalino are speaking of device drivers (on a Windows system), rather than the software included with the drive.
2275020
JBOD means the enclosure just passes the disks to your OS. It is possible to make an array in most operating systems but that can be done with any 2 hard drives at all. This device is essedntially just 2 external drives that share the same USB connection.
163743
Yes you can. However, it might not if you format the thumb drive to a different format. e.g. FAT32 versus NTFS or whatever?
2107966
Yes. Configuring the drives as RAID0 or JBOD will give you combined size of all drives with no redundancy presented to Windows as a single logical drive.
1913912
@Tony I believe you could. You'd have to create two partitions on the drive, one formatted in HFS+ (for Mac) and the other in NTFS (for Windows). I have never done any such thing but it might be worth a try. Of course, as these drives have come so far down in price, why not just buy two, one for Mac and the other for Windows?
1725679
Cool, different OS or OS that only supports FAT32 is one of those applications. I looked it up and the limitation in W7+ is you can only format partitions up to 32GB as FAT32 the easiest way to get around that is some free partitioning software. I use gparted Live CD because I know it's not bundled with Potentially Unwanted Programs (PUPs) but there are a lot of other options. If you want to see the disks as separate (JBOD) that works best with USB with eSATA you may need a SATA controller that supports port multiplier.
188306
yes, I have two of these boxes, & I set them to either raid 0 or leave it at the default which is JBOD. Currently, I buy a lot of Seagate Barracuda 4 terabyte drives, and swap them in and out of these boxes per my various jobs. I work off of the one box that I have at 16 terabytes raid 0, & I back up to the JBOD single drives. it all works fine, & I configure everything using Disk Utility.
659195
Mine did not need any reformat. I put 2 drives on it snd they worked without any reformating.
62528
I think my drive was formatted with ntfs but I can't remember for sure. I have received drives both formatted and blank. Drives I have received with back up software already installed have, for the most part, been formatted with ntfs.
1360577
There is an option to format the drives once you log in but it won't automatically format the drives when you install them into the unit.