Connecting an external HD to my Macbook Pro

Hardware
1

Evening everyone - noobie here making their first post, so hopefully you’ll bear with me!

Basically I’m looking to upgrade the NAS I have at home. To be able to transfer the hard drives from the old NAS to the new one, I need to completely format them to remove all partitions.

I believe the best (only?) way to do that is to connect the drives to my Macbook Pro and have that format them. But my question is how do I actually connect the drive to my laptop? Do I need some kind of case or something? Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thanks very much for the help in advance!

2

Search on Amazon (or equiv) for “hard drive disk external enclosure case” which I think will meet your needs.

3

Are you SURE you need to do that?

Most NAS systems will do the formatting
(usually referred to “initializing”) for you.

Plug the drive in, and you will be prompted.

Additionally if you are going “brand to brand”
the NAS will migrate the data for you.

A lot of caveats and dependencies here, but
I would plug the old drive into the new NAS
and see what happens.

You might be pleasantly surprised.

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4

Thanks for the replies both - much appreciated.

I’m going to be switching brands of NAS, so I’m not going to be able to simply pull the drive out and put it in the box. I was rather hoping that the new NAS would do the formatting for me too, but apparently I’m going to need to remove all partitions before putting into the new machine.

5

Which brands and model numbers?
How is the RAID set up and formatted (file system) on the old NAS? (SHR1,btrfs?)
How do you plan to set up RAID and the file system on the new NAS?

6

Hi John.

I’m moving from a WD Ex2Ultra (with 2x WD Red 4TB Drives) to a Synology DS918+.

The current system is setup in a standard RAID 1 format. Still deciding on how I want it to look on the Synology side of things to be honest with you!

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7

The Synology will initialize
the drives, removing any
existing partitions.

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8

Oh cool, really? So I just put the drives in as they are now and let the Synology work it’s magic?

9

Pretty much, yes.

Do you have an 8T drive lying around that you could backup your data to before removing the drives from the old NAS?

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10

If you have to work with bare drives one of these is very handy:

[Sabrent USB 3.0 to SATA I/II/III Dual Bay External Hard Drive Docking Station for 2.5 or 3.5in HDD, SSD with Hard Drive Duplicator/Cloner Function [10TB Support] (EC-HD2B) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0759567JT/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_qr6OEbH8CJP8F](Sabrent USB 3.0 to SATA I/II/III Dual Bay External Hard Drive Docking Station for 2.5 or 3.5in HDD, SSD with Hard Drive Duplicator/Cloner Function [10TB Support] (EC-HD2B) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0759567JT/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_qr6OEbH8CJP8F)

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11

I’m currently backing it up to Dropbox using Goodsync - we use Dropbox at work, so I have a private folder there which is limitless.

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