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I accumulated several external usb drives over time. Now, I end up with the following drives:

  • Western Digital 3.5" 1TB USB 2 (less than 1 year old)
  • Iomega 3.5" 320GB USB2 (2+ year old)
  • Custom built 2.5" 500GB WD Caviar Black USB2 / eSata
  • Western Digital 2.5" 500 GB USB2

My initial Idea was to reuse an "old" desktop PC as File / Media Server / NAS but I need an external drive for Virtual Machines (to attach to my notebook via eSata) as well.

At the end, did you end up with the same (or similar) amount of external drives? How do you reuse / span contents on such a storage ?

I already have a backup strategy with Windows 7 Backup using the 1TB drive.

Thank you for support.

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2 Answers

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I have several smaller/older drives which I primarily use to store complete system images or OS installation files. You can easily make a USB HDD bootable so they can be great system rescue/recovery disks.

In your case those, the 320GB and 500GB drives are still quite large and usable. You may want to use them to keep multiple back ups of photos and other important stuff. Maybe get one of those set-top-box like thingy (avi/mkv player box) and use those drives to view photos and videos on TV.

You may also want to get a pogoplug with one of the drives to form a dedicated download machine or personal file server.

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I have accumulated several drives in a similar fashion as you. In the end I decided to go with a RAID enclosure in level 5 configuration and merge all of my disks into one chassis - they were all 500 or 750 GB models. The RAID provides the best of both worlds - increased storage capacity and security from failure in one.

In your case you would likely want just a JBOD since you have such a variety of available drives. If memory serves I was able to get my enclosure for about $50 on sale from Newegg. A 3.5 inch only model can theoretically take a 2.5 inch drive if you get the necessary adapter.

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