Hi, I have a few hard drives that have various media files in them. I have been wanting to do this for a long time but didn't have the time to do so. What I want to do is separate the contents into their own separate groups, but I have gigs of data on each hard drive and want to find the best way to do this.

I have a USB Enclosure Drive for one of the hard drives if this is necessary. My biggest concern is will it slow down my speed considerably if I transfer from the Primary Slave to the Secondary Master and Slave drives...and vice-versa? How about using the USB Enclosure Drive for this? Or will it be even slower, so I should stick with the IDE connected hard drives?

I only have one hard drive in my current desktop, but have like 5 hard drives that I want to organize the data. I'm thinking of connecting like 3 hard drives to the desktop and use one in the enclosure.

What's the best (and fastest?) method to do this?

Thanks in advance.

The best way is IDE. You'll get the best speed when you connect them to different channels (or primary or secondary). If you' put them both on primary, then they have to share the bus.

USB is a good option too, it's fast but it tends to use some more CPU and it also has a larger response time (but that's more a problem for a lot of smaller files).

So, IDE is your way to

Yeah IDE (internal) is definitely going to be faster than USB. I think with th eamount of files you are dealing with USB could take significantly longer. If you needed the USB drive you could always take it out of the enclosure and use it as an internal drive.

Thanks for the replies guys

Yeah, my idea was to go full on IDE but with 5 or 6 total hard drives, that would mean I have to swap it in and out.

I'll hook up three hard drives at a time. If I need to transfer data from the two hard drives on the secondary channel, I'll deal with the slow speed. It's time to keep my files more organized. Need a 1 terabyte hard drive

This post has been edited by WeaponX: Oct 18 2006, 09:52 PM

or two 500 gig drives ? One internal and one in the USB box ?

Yeah, just waiting for the prices to drop. I always use the internal drives as externals by hooking them up to my USB enclosure drive since I'm working mainly on my laptop. Just got a 400GB Seagate hard drive for a good deal this week. That will be my starting point for transferring my files back and forth since it has the most space

This is a prime example of technology being so much behind our usage requirements. I have about 5 hard drives from old laptops which are all in perfect working order.It was bout 3 years ago I had also thought there should be a way to bank them all together as one. Here we are 3 years down the track and still no such device other than putting them individually in an external HD case and connect them to a usb hub. But mg that will be so slow.
Now we see meg external TB HD's coming out onto the market, but soon as we buy one , we will then have sold storage devises the same as storage cards are made in mega sizes making the HD obsolete. You will know when this is going to happen when the HD prices plunge. which this seams to be happening now.

-jcampen