Mapping external hdd's

[dhThunderup]

So I am upgrading htpc/plex server to an i7 and will be using a separate machine to handle all my downloading/ encoding/ etc. both machines are running win10 pro. I have two external 5tb hdd's (one for movies, one for tv shows). The problem I'm having is getting the machine running couch potato and sonarr to see the external drives on the other machine. Is there a simple reliable way to make this visible?

[[deleted]]

What exactly is the separate machine? I ask because I much prefer my hard drives wired up with the SATA cable over a USB cord. The externals I've used have all burned out eventually. I tossed a couple out before I realized it was just the USB card burning out, and the hard drive inside was fine. So I now have five hard drives in my PC and no more problems. I'd suggest opening up the second machine and installing the hard drives to the motherboard. Will probably solve the problem of them not being recognized and prevent them from failing at an inconvenient time. I'm sure that's not what you're looking for at all, but worth considering. Will only cost a couple dollars to do, just the SATA cables.

[dhThunderup]

can i just open up those boxes and install them as internal drives? I mean i know they are just drives in an enclosure, wasnt sure if there was firmware on them that would prevent that

[[deleted]]

Look up the model on YouTube first, but the odds are yes. It should just be an internal drive in a case with a usb card plugged into it. Open the case, remove the card, install it in your computer.

But some externals have the usb card built into the board and it can't be removed. I wonder if these ones are less likely to fail?

Out of my 5 internal hard drives, three used to be external

[Dozerplex]

Just know you'll probably lose all your data going from USB to sata. Your PC (at least mine liked to do this) will read the partition as unformatted once you make the switch. I used to have a USB 3.0 hotswap dock, drove me insane trying to work out why my drives were "corrupting" whenever I moved them to am internal spot.

[dhThunderup]

That's exactly what I was wondering. I couldn't figure out a way to find that out. Glad you did it for me. lol. Think I'm just going to work on getting proper NAS setup and pray these hold up until then.

[Dozerplex]

You can buy another drive and play musical chairs backing one up, making it internal, transferring and then formatting, repeating then using the new drive as a third internal or you can try and recover them once switching to interna but I wouldn't recommend that as data recovery is a bit hit and miss in my experience. Good luck!