How best to consolidate multiple hard drives?

T-Ray wrote:

Specific hardware suggestions greatly appreciated.

Get yourself one of these: https://www.orico.cc/us/product/subcategory/120.html

It doesn't have to be this exact brand. Anything you buy is going to be some white-label model made in the same factory. Make sure to get a 10 GB/s version. I wouldn't recommend any of the offline clone models. That seems too risky.

Also, remember that these things probably don't have sophisticated controllers. Don't try to copy from one bay to another on the same device. It will work for small amounts of data, but it's a big corruption/eject risk for large amounts of data. So you probably don't need more than 2 bays either.

And be careful with swapping. Always eject the drive, then power down the port, before removing a drive.

I don't know anything about Orico's units, but OWC makes one similar:

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/external-drives/owc-drive-dock

Or you can just go with something like this, for a short-term solution (shop around for the best price):

https://www.startech.com/en-us/hdd/usb3ssataide

Regards.

There's really not going to be a truly "easy" way to accomplish this. You're going to have to go through each drive one by one, decide what you wish to keep, then move that data to the device you choose to be your single central storage.

Without knowing what size storage you will need it's difficult to offer specific advice as to what to buy but overall I've been quite happy with the storage from OWC (Other World Computing aka MacSales). They offer drives of multiple types - magnetic, SSD, arrays - and interface methods, so you should find something that would suit. They also offer empty drive enclosures if you have raw drives you need to access.

Regards.