WOW, 16 HDD, thats alot. How much HDD space are we talking about?

I would try assigning a drive letter via the Disk Management in Windows, that should keep them from reassigning drive letters. Do you have a network login script that is assigning drive letters?  If so you might want to take a look at that.

You also might consider a NAS or Windows home server option to lower the number of drives.

I really need more info about how they are connected and configured.

I Guess I should have been a little more specific. I am accumulating movies to the extent that eventually I will run out of drive letters. I have all 1 & 1.5 gig hard drives and all connected at the same time using USB hubs. I DO NOT have all drives powered at the same time tho. Each drive is power switched so when I want to watch a movie I just switch on the power to the drive I need. I am working on a software utility that LoadDVD from mediadogg wrote can send info to to use the USB drive label instead of drive letter. Drive Labels or names can be infinate. I was just wondering if I overlooked a simpler way to accomplish this task. Thanx Guys & Gals.....

What I've done with my collection is to create a Share directory and then mounted each drive in a subdirectory under that share with no drive letter assigned to the drive.  Resolves the drive letter issue, only one is needed or zero if you refer to the UNC.

In my case, I named the subdirectories after the serial number of the drive that's mounted to it.  So if I'm getting errors on a particular directory, I know which drive it's attached to.

Quoting bfinejr:

Quote:
The LoadDVD plugin from mediadogg is really great except for one thing. I have approx 4000 DVDs on 16 external hard drives. The problem is that the drive letters sometimes change after rebooting the computer and the path listed on the database is then incorrect. Has anyone got a solution for this?

Thanks for the compliment. The way I avoid the problem I think has already been suggested: use UNC to access the drives.

You setup all the drives to be shared, limited by user if you want, and then give each drive (volume) a share name. Then, you can access any file on the drives from anywhere in your network as "\\pcname\sharename\filename".  If the drive letters get reassigned, it won't matter so long as the same share names are used. This is what I put in as filepaths in LoadDVD.

Perhaps you missed it, but this method described in the LoadDVD instructions (somewhere  ).

Reminder: I made BulkEdit originally to help with making changes for LoadDVD. If you need to change the filepaths in Notes, you can try using BulkEdit - Find/Replace to change all instances of "drive:\folder" to "\\pcname\share\folder" in Notes.

Quoting xradman:

Quote:
Doesn't that wipe out the entire drive array if one drive goes bad?

No, only one directory in the share becomes unavailable if the drive is unavailable due to power or failure.  There is no drive array in the sense that the system doesn't see one.  Your USB device could have a RAID setup but Windows still only sees one device.

I originally has NAS storage devices but those were network based and required a drive letter if not using the UNC.  I switched to multiple drives in my PC (which now functions as a NAS) to get away from that and mounting each drive to a directory under a shared directory.  My next step is to install eSATA devices like the Buffalo so each device has it's own RAID for redundancy but I can still maintain the directory mounting.