July 27, 2025Jul 27 I thought I read once that a drive pulled out of an Unraid NAS could be read natively by Windows explorer. I just upgraded a 3tb drive to 8tb. I took the 3tb drive and connected it to my Windows system by an USB to SATA adapter. I can see the drive in Disk Management, but cannot assign it a drive letter and Explorer does not see it.Simple question that really is are the drives pulled out of Unraid not accessible to read the contents by Windows explorer?
July 27, 2025Jul 27 Not unless you have software (non-standard) on Windows to read Linux file systems. Perhaps you are getting confused with the fact that Unraid drives are readable on any Linux system.Having said that the Unassigned Devices plugin on Unraid does allow for none-array drives with other file system types that ARE readable on Windows/Mac systems.
July 27, 2025Jul 27 I might ask, What do you want to do with that disk that you have removed from your Unraid server? Do you want to use (or install) it on your Windows computer? There are tools in Windows that will allow to reformat the disk for use with Windows.
July 28, 2025Jul 28 You can use WSL to mount an unraid disk on windows, because WSL is Linux.There is some info from microsoft here
July 28, 2025Jul 28 1 hour ago, Faceman said:You can use WSL to mount an unraid disk on windows, because WSL is Linux.I must admit that I had not thought of using WSL, and most Windows users are probably unfamiliar with it as they do not know Linux (and WSL is not installed by default). In the past I have used software from Paragon which has Linux file system drivers for Windows to allow me to read Unraid disks on a Windows system.On doing a quick check it looks like WSL should he able to handle XFS and BTRFS file system formats (although I have not tried it). ZFS and ReiserFS as the other two file systems widely used on Unraid (although ReiserFS is now deprecated) are not mentioned as being supported.
July 28, 2025Jul 28 Author My original purpose for hooking it up to my Windows PC was because I 'thought' I had read I could and I was going to copy the contents to my backup NAS. It does turn out the Unraid's new 8TB drive restored the contents back it appears perfectly (about 14 hours) from the Parity drive. So that was quite rewarding.I am getting my hands in Linux quite often now so I will check out the WSL. Appreciate all the input and feedback!
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