What to do with eight external USB hard drives?

MartinB

Hi, I'm not sure if this is the correct place to post as it's not specifically Gentoo related (although the system to which the drives are connected is indeed running Gentoo

).

Anyway, over a number of years, I've built up a fairly large collection of external USB hard drives after running out of internal drive bays in my PC. Here's what I've got on my desk:

2 x 3TB external
2 x 1TB external
2 x 750GB external
2 x 500GB external

The problem is, each drive requires its own USB connection and power socket outlet, and I'm running out of both (and I really don't want to daisy chain multi-way outlets together).

I'm wondering if there's any such device that I could use to "consolidate" these drives into that would require only one power outlet and one USB connection? (I assume USB3 or eSATA would be necessary to maintain speed from all the drives together).

The obvious solution would be to build a second PC to host the drives internally and access them as network drives (i.e. like a NAS), but this seems expensive and overkill for my requirements, and I'd rather not add additional fan noise to my living room. I've also seen RAID enclosures, but I don't think these would work given that all the drives are different capacities.

Does anyone know if there's anything I can do with these drives to make my setup a little more practical?
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py-ro · Veteran Joined: 24 Sep 2002 Posts: 1734 Location: Velbert

Hi,

something like this?

http://www.sharkoon.com/?q=en/node/2217

Bye
Py

Edit: Changed Link to english version

eyoung100 · Veteran Joined: 23 Jan 2004 Posts: 1428

Before you shop too hard, Consider:

Download a GParted Live CD
Use it to Free up space by shrinking the partition(s) on each device to the smallest size possible
Buy 3 of These Seagate Constellation ES.3 ST4000NM0053 4 TB 3.5" Internal Hard Drive
Test Them
Copy Data Over
Put them in your machine
Attempt to stay away from External USB

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MartinB · Posted: Wed Oct 30, 2013 11:48 am Post subject:

py-ro · Veteran Joined: 24 Sep 2002 Posts: 1734 Location: Velbert

Not it is not Windows Only, but depends of the ability of your esata to work with PortMultiplier.

But this is all mentioned on the product page.

eyoung100 · Veteran Joined: 23 Jan 2004 Posts: 1428