Possible to run a G-Technology G-SPEED Q with only 1x hard drive installed?

Question

I picked up an old G-Technology G-SPEED Q that had had all of it's internal drives removed. It previously held 4x 2TB hard drives that it could run RAID 0 or 5 accessible via USB 2.0, Firewire 800 and eSATA.

Is it possible to run a G-Technology G-SPEED Q with only 1x hard drive installed, like a regular USB HDD enclosure?

I don't want to go to the expense of purchasing 4x 2TB HDD's to test the unit only to find out that it doesn't work.

I've installed a single 2TB hard drive into it and while the unit is detected in both macOS and in Windows, I don't seem to be able to see the drive at all? I've downloaded and installed the latest configuration tools for both platforms and not had any luck. Additional info from comment:

I tried the drive with a few HDDs of different sizes (even using a 2,5inch laptop drive on the bottom tray) so that I could fill it up and it started working! The drive can be initialised now! At least it's good to know that the unit works with drives of different sizes (even form factors) and isn't limited to drives from any particular manufacturer.

Answer 1

So for anyone else struggling with this in future. If you get an empty unit like I did, you need to fill up all 4x bays with hard drives to get this unit started. Only then will you be able to initialise the drive as either RAID 0 or RAID 5 using the Configuration Tool and have it show up in macOS disk utility. Thereafter you can pull out one of the drives and use only 3x (but really there is no point in doing this because it defeats the purpose of the device and leaves you at risk.

It appears that it's not possible to use this unit as a simple single drive enclosure for a single hard drive and make it work like a USB HDD enclosure. Not even dual hard drives appear to work (no RAID 1 mirroring support).