Reusing NAS Hard Drives

I wasn't exactly sure where to best put this post, so stuck it here.

Currently I have a D-Link DNS-323 NAS with 2 1TB drives in RAID1 and am considering dropping the NAS from my Network and reusing the drives elsewhere.

I am assuming the drives are formatted EXT2 (will check when I get home), I would like to put the drives in an external enclosure and do a direct file transfer before reformatting the drives for other use. Any reasonable way to do this? Would really hate to have to wait on 700GB to transfer over my network.

I also assume (since they are RAID1) that I only need one of the drives to do the transfer with. Right/wrong?

The RAID set up is NAS, so it IS backing up already over your network, correct?

If the drives have been written on and are not brand new, I would format them.

Not sure if I can answer your question

microsnook said:

The RAID set up is NAS, so it IS backing up already over your network, correct?

If the drives have been written on and are not brand new, I would format them.

Not sure if I can answer your question

Click to expand...

Actually it is currently serving as a 3rd or 4th Tier backup for files (I'm kind of paranoid about backups) and a as pseudo-media server.

I could just pull and reformat the drives, but on the off-chance I might lose something worthwhile, I was going to copy the drive to a large single external drive first (or possibly put one drive in an enclosure and use it as the archived copy--I did admit I was a bit paranoid on backups). ;P

Mike, since you are using RAID 1, you can pull either of the drives and copy the contents to one of your other backup locations to sort through later on. Once finished and verified (of course ) you can format the 2 drives for other use..

Raz0rEdge said:

Mike, since you are using RAID 1, you can pull either of the drives and copy the contents to one of your other backup locations to sort through later on. Once finished and verified (of course ) you can format the 2 drives for other use..

Click to expand...

How do I go about reading EXT2 format on my Mac?

I guess I could fire up the Linux box and copy that way to FAT32

Yeah that's an option, I've been using MacFuse to access EXT3 partitions on my SD card (I deal with this for work) and that works great too..

But a VirtualBox VM with Linux works just as well and probably with less hassle with configuration..