Mounting the NAS as a regular drive in windows? Maintenence and upkeeping?

[goesprotocall]

I have a rather old LS-WVL (that's what the label said, but on the status page it says CS-WV. Lost the box, can't really what I bought back then) that I just dug out of the storage box and hope to get it kicking again.

My main reason then for getting the NAS is the RAID 1 mirror backup, but I've forgotten what a pain it is to use a NAS as compared to using a regular external HDD for backup. You know, the user experience is pretty different.

I didn't thought (when I decided to ditch the NAS years ago) it would be possible to do some hacks to make the NAS work like a big thumdrive, but now I'm hoping some of you here might know how.

Also, could I somehow disable the RAID settings and use the full 4TB (2x2TB drives) capacity as it is? Should I have to perform regular defragmentation or whatnot to keep it in tip top condition? or will frequent defragmenting reduce the lifespan of the drives?

Any tips?

[oxygen8]

2x2TB = normal mode

format the drives
do not create raid
create share one the first drive and share2 on the second

[goesprotocall]

But I've only got these 2 options. It's kinda why I was hoping for a firmware upgrade.

[oxygen8]

I am not using this FW
It is possible that it is not able to use normal mode on the CS

[goesprotocall]

WELP!

[oxygen8]

independent looks like normal mode

[davo]

Independent is normal mode which means there is no RAID and the disks are seperate. Once you do this you can select which disk you want to create the shares on.

it would be possible to do some hacks to make the NAS work like a big thumdrive, but now I'm hoping some of you here might know how.

On this, no, it's not possible, the unit would need to support iSCSI, which it does not.