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.