Max amount of HDD to Raid

[N00bie]

Silly question is there a limit on how many drives you can raid, obviously the drives have to be the same.

 

[shadowake]

Silly question is there a limit on how many drives you can raid, obviously the drives have to be the same.

You would run out of SATA ports first

 

[master811]

obviously the drives have to be the same.

Not entirely true, (well it would be for something like Raid 0 or 1) but some software Raids (and I think hardware too) will support different sized drives, at least using Raid 5 or 6 as then it allows you to 'upgrade' your array without having to start over completey.

 

[miniyazz]

The drives don't even have to be the same for RAID 0 or 1; but different size disks means they are all limited to the size of the smallest. Same thing with RAID 5/6. In fact it's usually better to use disks from different manufacturers for things like RAID1 especially, as they will then perform differently under the same workload - stops them all failing at once so redundancy is maintained better!
And you can buy 28-port SATA controller cards without looking too hard, though it'll set you back a grand or more.