Transferring 3 External drives to 1 Big external

[soonerfitz]

I'm nearing completion on a 4-year documentary on PP but still need faster workflow for it to finish the job. Right now it's slowed to a snail's pace even after maxing out my RAM. So I bought a bigger drive (20TB) with Thunderbolt 2.  I currently have material on my I-Mac (2015 late) and 3 external USB Hard drives. Much of the material lives and is backed up on at least 2 of these external drives, all which are nearing capacity. All formatted as Ex-Fat.

3 External Drives (all USB):

8TB G-Raid

4TB My Passport

2TB My Passport

I want to work from just the new 20TB drive, but I'm a little hesitant on how I should set it up to avoid any file confusion.  Should I try to clone the drives, or make partitions on the new drive and label the partitions the same as the old drives?

Any insight is much appreciated! 

[salvo34 · Accepted solution]

I bought a laptop just for the purpose of transferring media on locations. SSD drives to other SSD drives ( via USB ). Basically the laptop was supposed to be used away from home just to xfer files from one external to others.

I use exfat ( on pc ) and it just takes a long time to do due to files sizes.

I would just make folders on your new big external drive, and label them like " drive A duplicate", drive B duplicate, etc.. no partitions.

When done you'll have duplicate stuff of the other hard drives and you can now clear them out so they can be used later for new stuff.

[soonerfitz]

Interesting...

So don't label the folders exactly the same... just add the word "Duplicate" and then copy all the folders/files into one big Folder for the 1st drive? I was wondering if exact labeling of the big folders would help Premeire locate the files easier.

Then do the same for the other 2 drives? Sounds pretty easy

[salvo34]

yeah, once you have the main folder made in new drive and then move everything into that from your other drives, the folders for those drives will be the same names, so you can relink stuff easy after you find the root folder.

[soonerfitz]

Worked great. Thank you for the confidence builder.