How to Index that Shelf Full of Bare Hard Drives

I've got maybe a dozen bare or USB HDDs that I use for storing disk images and other big chunks of data.

When I'm heading out to a customer site, I'm never sure which HDD has enough free space for the disk image I might want to make. And when I need a particular disk image, I'm never sure on which HDD it might be stored.

So I have to connect 3 or 4 HDDs to my bench machine, boot it up and look at the HDDs with Windows Explorer. Then I have to rinse and repeat with the next 3 or 4 drives, until I find a HDD with sufficient free space or with the particular disk image I'm looking for.

Today I went looking for a better way, and I found it.

WinCatalog Light is a free download at www.wincatalog.com. It builds a catalog by scanning individual HDDs. Scans are very fast; typically just a few seconds for a complete HDD.

In the screenshot below, you see a catalog of HDDs whose volume labels were ComboGB_1, Dock_1, Dock_2, Dock_3, and Dock_5.

What's special about this is that we are now looking at a fully browsable, fully searchable, Explorer-like view of HDDs that are no longer attached to this machine.

USB/eSATA external HDDs for backup

I hear lots of concern about whether 3.5" portable HDDs are really sufficiently dependable to use as a backup solution. I've had no problems, but then I don't buy mystery packages. I choose my drive and I choose my enclosure. Here's what's worked for me.

Drives:

I use server-grade drives, typically Seagate Barracuda ES or ES.2. Seagate claims a 10x improvement in unrecoverable error rate compared with their desktop drives. MTBF is 1.2 million hours. Warranty is five years.

Drive Enclosures:

I use the MacAlly PHR-100 SU enclosures. These take SATA drives and have both a USB and a SATA connector. The drive is somewhat vibration-isolated from the enclosure by silicone-rubber donuts at each mountpoint. Note that the SATA connector is not eSATA, but the enclosures come with an adapter for connecting to eSATA cables.

Once you get the hang of it, you can mount a drive in an enclosure in about six minutes.

Carrying cases:

For transporting the drives, a $15 foam-filled pistol case works great.
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They're way lighter than Pelican cases, and way cheaper too. Three layers of foam; just make a cutout in the center layer to fit your drive. Sooner or later the drive is gonna get dropped or tossed in somebody's trunk. The pistol case takes away the worry.