I’m not sure if this question belongs here or in another thread (I apologize but I am somewhat of a been her at SE).

I have a windows server (Dell PowerEdge r740xd attached to a storage controller that houses 9 – 8 + 1 spare – 22TB Seagate Iron Wolf Pro drives, offering roughly 124 TB of open storage.

I just installed a Cisco 2960x switch and the server is now running through that to my router. Plenty of room to expand with so many ports.

However, my conundrum is that I have several external hard drives and flash drives that contain data that I want to copy over to the server. Yet when I attempt to plug in one of the drives directly into the server’s USB port, it automatically wants to format it and add it to the RAID array. I do not want that.

So my question is this: if there an affordable option or method to connect these USB drives via Ethernet so that the server or any other device on my network can see and read/write to/from?

Some of the drives are formatted for Mac and others are formatted for PC.

I looked at DigiAnywhere – they have solid reviews and no doubt probably are great products, but are completely out of my realm of affordability. A 5-8 port would be adequate. I’d like to transfer data at ful 1 Gb/s speed.

Any suggestions?

Thank you. 😊

I haven’t tried anything except researching with Google and a recommendation from a friend. The DigiAnywhere products would be amazing to own, but too pricey. I don’t know what other tech or options are available for this situation.