Multiple external hard drives to one searchable drive

[DesertCliff]

I have about a dozen different types of hard drives that I've used for back-up and general storage over the past ten or more years (all used with Macs) and now want to create one large external drive that I can easily search to find mostly photo files in preparation for an upcoming book. Any thoughts on a dependable, large external drive that would be a good choice for this project? And how would I go about transferring everything from the multiple external drives to this one new drive? Any information or thoughts would be greatly appreciated. The new external drive will be used with my current iMac:

iMac (27-inch, Mid 2011)
OS X El Capitan 10.11.6
Processor 3.1 GHz Intel Core i5
Memory 4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Graphics AMD Radeon HD 6970M 1024 MB

 

[bobtomay]

No one can make any sort of appropriate recommendation without knowing how much data (hence what size drive) you need to store on the new drive.

Ex. are you looking for a 1 TB drive or will you require a 8 TB RAID array?

 

[DesertCliff]

Good point. I would think that a 1 TB drive would be more than sufficient. Thanks.

 

[bobtomay]

Not many options since there are only 2 hard drive manufacturers left. For that use, I would just go with a WD My Passport which you can get for $60 or less at practically any electronics retailer - or a 2 TB for about $90. If you have a Fry's local to you, they have these on sale quite often.

They'll come formatted as NTFS when you get one, so just reformat it when you connect it up or pay extra to get one "for Mac" and pay an $10-20 for them to have formatted it for you.

 

[DesertCliff]

Not many options since there are only 2 hard drive manufacturers left. For that use, I would just go with a WD My Passport which you can get for $60 or less at practically any electronics retailer - or a 2 TB for about $90. If you have a Fry's local to you, they have these on sale quite often.

They'll come formatted as NTFS when you get one, so just reformat it when you connect it up or pay extra to get one "for Mac" and pay an $10-20 for them to have formatted it for you.

Thanks very much for this information!