daisy chainable external hdd's?

[Maezr]

I have a lot of spare HDD's lying around. I'd like an easy way to access them. I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be possible to have some sort of daisy chainable setup for them, but I never see products like this

any ideas?

 

[Arcanedeath]

External firewire enclosures allow this

 

[scott0482]

if you are like me, they are probably all small hard drives.. you might as well just copy them all to one large drive.. it is much cheaper than the cost of all the external enclosures..

 

[Maezr]

what would be the best solution for powering all of them then?

 

[pukemon]

Like Arcanedeath said above, all firewire enclosure allow for daisy-chaining devices. Otherwise, if you go with USB enclosures, you'll likely need a USB hub.

Still, the best advice is to copy or move all the data from the old, small drives, onto a new large drive. You'll save a whole lot more electricity and have quicker random access to your data. Especially with the AT crowd, it's not unusual to a stack of old hard drives on a shelf, or in a closet.

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

A bunch of laptop hard drives would be fun; USB bus powered, so all you would have to worry about is powering the USB hubs which would be considerably easier.

 

[stogez]

Firewire enclosures would work but they all require separate power. It'll just be a mess of cables for not much gain. How big are these drives that you're trying to use? If they're less than 80GB, its definitely not worth it considering that each enclosure will probably cost $25 or so while a 500GB HDD can be had for around $100.

 

[ding5550123]

You can buy external enclosers like These

 

[M0RPH]

If you really want to use these old drives then you're best bet would be a removeable drive enclosure, like this. Then you'd have to buy trays for each drive, but at least you don't have to buy a whole new enclosure for every one. These things come in external or internal versions, as well as for IDE or SATA drives.