Help With External HD [replacing the 2 HDs question]

ttechfs

Distinguished
Jun 2, 2011
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18,630
Hi, I have a Lacie External Hard Drive. It's a "double decker". It has 2 1TB hard drives in it. So it's 2TB total. From the day I set it up in 2009, it's never read as 2 1TB drives, it's always read as one big 2TB drive even though there's 2 drives in it. So, my big question is, if I want to take these out and replace them with 2 3TB HDs to make 6GB total, am I going to run into a problem disconnecting these 2 hard drives from each other when there's over 1TB of data on the drive?

Like could that ruin the information on the drives? Or does it know when to split? Like I have 1.2TB full. Does it know to put 1TB on one drive and leave 200GB on the other when I take it all apart? None of my files would be corrupted?


This is a huge concern of mine. Hopefully someone knows and can answer.


Thank you.
 
first of all the two drives are configured in Raid0 that's why they show up as one drive.

second you cannot split the drives, and to be able to read the data they need to be connected to that controller in the Lacie. Data is written across both drives at the same time. So half of the data is on one the other on the second one

third does the Lacie support 3TB hard drives and are you able to configure via a configuration menu? it might only support max 2TB drives

fourth to change the drives you need to copy all the data one drive (2TB drive), swap the old drives with the new once and configure them, then lastly copy the data from the 2TB drive to the external.
 

LaCieTech

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Aug 9, 2012
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10,520
Hi,

Everything Emerald said is accurate. The Big Disks (our name for your disk) has two drives which are hardware RAID 0 and cannot be separated. The chipset on the enclosure will only support disks that were available when it was built, so likely 1TB is your limit but maybe 1.5TB or 2TB - the only way to know would be to try them.

You will lose all of your data if you remove the disks from the enclosure. Your safest bet is to just purchase a new external drive with the capacity you're after and make a backup of your data and leave the Big Disk intact.

You can call us to discuss your options in more detail if you want, we're at 503-844-4500 (USA) or www.lacie.com/mystuff

~mn, LaCie