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I am not very familiar with high-end computer hardware.

Currently I have 7-8 USB hard drives. I find it very messy to attach them to computer with 8 USB cables and then 8 power adapters and then USB hub.

Is there any rack or anything available so that I don't need to attach them separately? Ideally, I could put 10 hard drives in slot, which will take care of power supply, and then from that rack I have only one power cable and one USB cable which I can join to my computer.

I don't know what to call that thing.

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  • Sounds like you want an "8 bay external enclosure" or a NAS (network-attached storage) setup.
    – Louis Waweru
    Commented Oct 25, 2013 at 1:01
  • Get a power strip, a USB Hub and a box to put all of the gear in. Done
    – Oliver Salzburg
    Commented Oct 29, 2013 at 19:44

2 Answers 2

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They are called "External USB drive enclosures." 10 bay enclosures arent cheap, though.

Here is an example of one.

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  • can u send the product link from internet , i could not find it
    – user191542
    Commented Oct 25, 2013 at 1:06
  • Note, make sure the enclosure(s) supports JBOD (just a bunch of disks) mode. you will have to format your disks if you want to use any other form of RAID. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-RAID_drive_architectures#JBOD
    – Frank Thomas
    Commented Oct 25, 2013 at 1:07
  • @Keltari I never used an enclosure. Does it mean I can access one disk at aa time only, or can I do parallel read/writes?
    – MariusMatutiae
    Commented Oct 25, 2013 at 8:01
  • you can access them all at once
    – Keltari
    Commented Oct 25, 2013 at 12:34
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Do they have to be external? Most "external" drives are really just internal drives with some added circuitry to allow them to connect over USB. You can probably remove the casing on them and plug them into the SATA or IDE ports on your motherboard. (depending on the age of the drive). You can also get PCI cards with additional SATA or IDE ports if you don't have enough. These are usually quite inexpensive. You can even get cages similar to this that mount in 5.25 inch drive bays, to allow you to more easily remove the drives.

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  • this can work, but few desktop cases will hold that many. more than likely you would need several sata power splitters and his power supply might not handle it.
    – Keltari
    Commented Oct 25, 2013 at 12:39
  • Yeah, I don't know if it will work in this case, but in general it's not a bad option to be aware of. It's probably cheaper to just buy a whole new case with a whole new power supply, plus a PCI card to accommodate those drives than going with the External USB drive enclosure mentioned in the other answer. Plus, you'll get much better performance by running everything over SATA instead of trying to use USB.
    – Kibbee
    Commented Oct 27, 2013 at 15:21

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