How mang HDD's can you use at once?

bloodline76 · 4 Jul 2008 at 14:11

I have a 36gig sata raptor as Operating system (XP)
a 80gig pata as Operating system (Visat64)
a 250 sata as storage
and a 500 sata as storage

My brothers computer has died and has a new 300gig pata drive in it that he does not want. So how many drives can you run at once?

Thanks

rpstewart · 4 Jul 2008 at 14:15

As many as you have controller ports for.

I'm up to 12 and I still have 4 ports free.

bloodline76 · 4 Jul 2008 at 14:16

rpstewart said:
As many as you have controller ports for.

I'm up to 12 and I still have 4 ports free.

Nice. Thanks!

lopkinfop · 4 Jul 2008 at 16:37

controller ports are usually the limitation

normally 2 pata on new MB or 4 on old and 4-6 sata.

the OS is limited to 26 total drives i think (correct me if im wrong)

so technically if you used 4 bay external cases with a raid function you could have 100+ with enough I/O ports

rpstewart · 4 Jul 2008 at 16:40

lopkinfop said:
the OS is limited to 26 total drives i think (correct me if im wrong)

Mounting drives on NTFS paths gets round the drive letter limitations.

lopkinfop · 4 Jul 2008 at 19:11

how does that work? do you see the mounted drives as a folder within another drive?

rpstewart · 4 Jul 2008 at 19:19

Yeah, rather than picking a drive letter in disk management you pick a folder and once mounted that folder appears on the source drive (as c:\data for example) but the data itself is on the second disk. It's the same as mounting filesystems in UNIX.