I have accumulated a number of external USB Hard Drives over the years.
Is there a device which allows me to connect these drives, which would then connect to the computer as a single drive? I would imagine that each physical drive would appear as a directory under the virtual drive.
I know that there are alternative solutions:
- a powered USB hub: this would still appear as multiple USB devices
- a USB NAS adapter: this appears as a network drive
They are both feasible, but I would like to know whether there is a solution which virtually combines the drive as one USB drive.
I might mention that I am using a Macintosh, but I don’t see that that would make any difference if there is a truly hardware solution.
31 Answer
We think the answer is "Yes", although that isn't really a very effective answer owing to the real estate required to connect the EXTERNAL USB flash drives (there is a Gadgeteer adapter that converts 10 micro sd cards into a SATA adapter, which can then be converted to USB).
Likely you'll find the RocketU HighPoint Dual USB 3.0 for Mac Components meets your specified requirement, though it only connect two devices (remember the problem with real estate?)
The solution to the "real estate" problem may be these Macally powered hubs (because you have a lot of devices).
As for them showing up as several devices, "Yes, but", but you can use Mac OS X disk utilities to make them appear as a "concatenated" (JBOD) drive. The instructions are below but DON'T DO THIS! Why? You'll end up formatting the USB drives, which is necessary to any JBOD RAID, so you may not be asking for the right thing.
Instead, create sub-directories on you main drive and mount the USB sticks as those sub-directories. (Please see Mount USB drive as local folder on Mac) This will create the effect you want.
Done!
JBOD instructions follow:
Please see instructions on:
Open Disk Utility either by going to “Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility” or from the Finder, press “Command + Shift + U” to go to the Utilities folder and start Disk Utility.
Select one of the drives you want to turn into a RAID and click the RAID tab.
(Don't select and format the system drive....)
Names the RAID, Select "Mac OS Extended" as the format and select "Concatenated Disk Set" as the RAID type.
Press the “Create” button. After a some formatting, Your single named RAID will appear on your desktop for use.
