how many HDD can i have on my XP pc?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jasonc
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Jasonc

I have an emachine with xp running, I would like to have a few more hard
drives added.

does anyone know how many I can have, with out blowing up the pc!!!


thanks in advance


Jason
 
Jasonc said:
I have an emachine with xp running, I would like to have a few more hard
drives added.

does anyone know how many I can have, with out blowing up the pc!!!


thanks in advance


Jason
Click to expand...
This depends on three factors:

- power supply. Adding a hd requires more power. Not usually a
constraint but...

- Physical space obviously

- Number of CD drives you have. Most motherboards include a double
controller, eacher being able to handle two drives. If you have just a
CD drive, chances are you could have 3 hd. If you have a CD-W + DVD,
then, two hd.

Of course, in special case, you can add a SCSI controller in which case,
the number of SCSI drives you can have is much higher, but there I am
out of my league...
 
My last Maxtor 200GB drive came bundled with a controller card that would
support 2 extra IDE drives, for a total of 4 for my MB.
 
Jasonc said:
I have an emachine with xp running, I would like to have a few more hard
drives added.

does anyone know how many I can have, with out blowing up the pc!!!


thanks in advance


Jason
Click to expand...

One limitation with emachines is the cheesy power supply, and if you've got
one of the smaller cases, you've also got space issues. You might want to
consider buying a real case with a beefier power supply to solve those
issues.

Ignoring that, without adding another controller card, it's most likely you
can have 4 ide devices. If you've got 1 cd drive you can possibly have 3
hard drives.
 
You might consider having a smaller Hard drive for XP, but then getting a
large Hard drive with several partitions, so there wouldn't be such a drain
on your power supply.

Jerry
 
My motherboard supports 8 drives, but with addon controllers, you could
theoretically go to 26 drives, unless XP has extended this even more.
 
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