Old External HDD Solutions

[Dreisman]

I'm looking for a solution to 'Unify' the mess of old External HDD's I've collected over the years.

 

At first I was thinking of just buying two 8TB external Seagate Expansions, or some other Archive style HDD and transfering all my old data to one of the new drives, while having the other for incoming data to be stored, but then I discovered I could possibly use a 4 bay-Enclosure and just swap the drives from their old Miscellaneous stock cases to one easy to access unit.

 

The data I have is from my "Noob" years. It's organised by years/clients... Personal/School... whatever. It's a mess I plan on sometime reorganising in the future, but for now Id just prefer to have a neat package than to have to deal with storing multiple, oddly shaped enclosures and power adapters.

 

Does anyone have experience dealing with this? 

What would be the smartest solution? 

 

An expensive NAS  is out the question for me right now.

[LukeSavenije]

get an old pc if you don't have one already and put those harddrives in it, transfer it over and have one neat package. a nas doesn't really give any more possebilities.

[Montgomery C Burns]

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[seagate_surfer]

When moving data consider this; Disk cloning uses sequential reads/writes, that means that each one of the blocks of data in the old drives will be read in sequence, (I know it sounds obvious but it needs to be said) and this is better because it makes a full sweep of the entire disk, you can read more about sequential and random IOPS here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequential_access

 

Any software that can offer the feature to clone your old drives can help you do this, just be advised you will need a drive that equals or is bigger than the old unit because if you try to clone to a smaller hard drive you will get storage error messages...