Possible Maximum hard drives?

What is the max number of hard drives that can be installed (via SATA, or
IDE) on a single CPU windows xp based machine? and can anyone recommend a
motherboard that is suitable for a large number of drives?

mikea wrote:
What is the max number of hard drives that can be installed (via SATA, or
IDE) on a single CPU windows xp based machine? and can anyone recommend a
motherboard that is suitable for a large number of drives?


My guess is 28 -- 4 on the motherboard controller and 4 each on 6 PCI
card controllers. Powering and cooling all those drives would be a
challenge, though. Plus, you need to get them all within 18" of the
motherboard. And you need to find an effective way to back them up.

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It's not the motherboard or operating system, it's the controllers.
They are called SCSI, one main stream SCSI controller can easily control 15
SCSI hard drives.

If you only want ATA/IDE stuff, I believe Abit made a mother board that had
6
built in ATA/IDE controllers, so 12 IDE devices could be hooked up.

Plus adding extra PCI ATA controllers, each controller controlling 4 hard
drives.
So how many PCI slot does the motherboard have ?

You can also hook up external hard drives in USB or Firewire cases
Maybe a dozen or more externals hooked up ?

"mikea" wrote in message
...
What is the max number of hard drives that can be installed (via SATA, or
IDE) on a single CPU windows xp based machine? and can anyone recommend a
motherboard that is suitable for a large number of drives?

"mikea" wrote in message
What is the max number of hard drives that can be installed (via SATA,
or IDE) on a single CPU windows xp based machine?

128

and can anyone recommend a motherboard that is suitable for a large
number of drives?

Tod wrote:

It's not the motherboard or operating system, it's the controllers.
They are called SCSI, one main stream SCSI controller can easily control
15 SCSI hard drives.

If you only want ATA/IDE stuff, I believe Abit made a mother board that
had 6
built in ATA/IDE controllers, so 12 IDE devices could be hooked up.

Plus adding extra PCI ATA controllers, each controller controlling 4 hard
drives.
So how many PCI slot does the motherboard have ?

You can also hook up external hard drives in USB or Firewire cases
Maybe a dozen or more externals hooked up ?

You're thinking small. Google "SATA RAID" and "ATA RAID external" and
you'll find a ton of hits on interesting stuff.

It's conceptually possible to put together a solution using a high-end SCSI
RAID controllers and external SCSI-to-SATA enclosures that has more than
three thousand SATA devices in it. That, using the largest available SATA
devices, would be over 1.5 petabytes in capacity. I don't want to maintain
the thing. At least not unless you pay me a _hell_ of a lot.

Take a look at http://www.raidking.com/rk827.htm and
http://www.lsilogic.com/products/megaraid/scsi_320_4x.html for the pieces
for that configuration.

A smaller alternative would use four 3Ware
http://www.3ware.com/products/serial_ata9000.asp RAID controllers with
12 devices each for a total of 48 and only 19 terabytes capacity. In either
case a motherboard with four PCI-X slots available, preferably on separate
buses, would be needed to get maximum performance. A Supermicro X5DL8-GG
would be one option--it has 6 slots on 3 buses--not optimal but pretty
good.



"mikea" wrote in message
...
What is the max number of hard drives that can be installed (via SATA, or
IDE) on a single CPU windows xp based machine? and can anyone recommend a
motherboard that is suitable for a large number of drives?




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