Depends on the operating system of the NAS, but generally the NAS will want to format the drive. Even if you can somehow get it running without a disk format you’re generally in an unsupported configuration.
Comment on NAS decision paralysis
victorz@lemmy.world 12 hours agoThanks for the notes on network storage access protocols!
A big point of a NAS in my mind is to run some sort of redundancy, which means you will want to setup a RAID on the drives in the NAS
Cool, thank you for that as well, and I was aware of that so I thought I would mention that in my previous comment. But I was specifically wondering if I could in fact just chuck them in as-is and it would be able to access the drives? Because like, they’re separate drives, right? How would that work in a non-RAID setup when accessing from another computer? Would they show up as separate drives? Is it at all possible?
anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 10 hours ago
victorz@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Yeesh, okay, I see.
Then maybe some kind of compact drive bay would suit my needs better for now, that I would just connect to a mini PC of some sort.
irmadlad@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
I have a shelf of NetGear ReadyNas-4 bay enclosures. They are old as the hills ReadyNas 214 with OS 6.10.3. The first 2 of them are set up as JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Drives) 8 bays x 10 tb drives . They have no RAID setups on them. They all show up as separate drives. Now, you may need to set up permissions to access the drives, but they all act independently of each other. However, in that setup, if a drive fails, well you’re SOL. Some caveats would be that the drives to be inserted into the JBOD NAS setup need to be formatted in a compatible file system such as EXT4 or NTFS
The other 2 ReadyNas-4 bay enclosures are set up as RAID 10. So using RAID 10, you have ~30 tb usable space and 1 10tb drive for redundancy per each ReadyNas unit.