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I have about 10 external hardisks in their own enclosure, and I want to know the best way of keeping them easily accessible. Right now I don't have the files indexes because I cannot keep them running all at the same time.So if i want to search for a file, I have to access them one by one.

So what would you do to easily access your files if you have 10+ external drives?

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How big are the drives?

Im thinking it would be easier, more energy efficient and quieter if you brought a single large hard drive and use that for all your files.

Drives are reasonably cheap, and if you buy a NAS you can simply connect it to a network and the files are accessible anywhere on the same network. It would require little time to setup and the files are always available.

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This. Consolidating and attaching drives to the network is probably the best solution it will also streamline future backups of the data on those drives. – Tyler Jan 10 '10 at 19:35
I agree with Connor W My first choice would be to hang the drives off my NAS and keep them on. If I can't do that or I wanted better protection for the data, I would move the data to some fault tolerant RAID, probably with larger drives or something that can use more drives like a Drobo Pro. – Scott McClenning Jan 10 '10 at 21:03
the total size is about 7TB at the moment, and growing at a rate of 1TB every 4 month.. 7TB NAS would be quit expensive? – lydonchandra Jan 11 '10 at 1:06
Are you just using drives that you have spare for the extra data or are you buying new drives? You can get 1 or 2 TB drives reasonably cheap, and 4 drive NAS systems arent very hard to find. You could always sell the old drives afterwards to recoupe some of the costs. – Connor W Jan 11 '10 at 17:22
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If I couldn't keep the drives online all the time and all I cared about were file names (not file contents), I would dump the directories to a text file to search. (tree x:\ /f /a > drive1.txt)

If I needed the contents of the file indexed, I don't know if there is a desktop search tool that will keep indexes of offline files. I've seen some "catalog" programs that claimed to do this, but I don't recall their name. I would give X1 a shot.

Good luck.

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Two utilities that might make it easier foor you to index the drives:

The JR Directory Printer utility allows you to print a listing of every file contained within a directory and/or subdirectories.

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No more fumbling with My Computer or Windows Explorer, wishing you could print information about all your files. Karen's Directory Printer can print the name of every file on a drive, along with the file's size, date and time of last modification, and attributes (Read-Only, Hidden, System and Archive)! And now, the list of files can be sorted by name, size, date created, date last modified, or date of last access.

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Since you're dealing with multiple drives, you might as well merge the output TXT files.

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What can JR Directory printer do that regular dir cannot ? – ldigas Jan 10 '10 at 19:29
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