Do I need to initialize my disks under single mode?

[Hisen]

Before I prepare new large-volume disks for RAID, I plan to use this devices as single mode. I have 3 different disks with lots of data at this moment. So I have a question, if I set the device as single mode, do I need to initialize and format these disks? Will these disks be shown up as 3 independent disks on PC?
Thank you.

[Admin_Mediasonic]

If they were raid drives, you will not be able to read them in Single mode
you need to back up data 1st
then change to single mode, initialize and reformat the drives

[broderp]

Just to add some clarity for anyone who comes across this short thread.

I want to use this in SINGLE mode as well to unload files on several drives. My drives were NOT part of a RAID previously.

What I found was the ProRAID comes out of the box defaulted to SINGLE mode. I was able to simply install my drives and after plugging into my USB port power it up and it almost instantly was recognized and I had drives popping up on my Windows 8.1 PC that I was able to access and transfer files to and from.

In the above scenario, you do NOT need to initialize the drives first. It's plug and play.