Possible Maximum hard drives?

  • Thread starter Thread starter mikea
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mikea

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 said:
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?
Click to expand...
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.
 
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 said:
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?
Click to expand...
 
Tod said:
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 ?
Click to expand...

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.
 
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