How many drives cani have?

[Blyss]

Was just wondering how many drives I can have on my PC before my computer decides not to work?

thanks

 

[ski]

It depends on your power supply's watt capacity if you install only internal drives on the IDE channels and on controller cards.
But you can avoid overloading the PS by installing USB drives that have their own power supplies. And powered USB hubs will prevent overloading the MB's onboard USB hubs.

 

[Blyss]

Thanks

 

[ski]

You're welcome.

 

[edfair]

Or SCSI externals. To the limits of drive letters.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[jurgen36]

It also depends on the main bord you have, the power supply and the bios.

I use in one of my computers a total of ten (10) drives without any extra cards. The mobo is Gigabyte SINXP1394.
2x SATA drives, 4x normal IDE drives, 4 x normal IDE in the raid channels. The problem is the power supply, I need a minimum of 550 watts as the processor the P4 3.2 HT EE alone takes 132 watts on the 1.5 volt line. With SCSI drives the sky would be the limit.
Regards

Jurgen

 

[terrybogard4]

how do you manage space inside your tower ?


Terr

 

[zbnet]

The other thing to watch out for is ventilation - new drives get pretty hot, and if you put lots in a case you will increase your need to have a good cooling system inside the case. Hot drives fail much quicker than cooler ones, so this is a very real consideration.

There are some drive cooler mountings that fit inside 5.25 bays, with fans in the front, and they mount the 3.5 drives behind them. These are good, they blow external air right over the drives to cool them, and extend your drive capacity because you don't need to use the (generally uncooled) internal 3.5 bays

 

[jurgen36]

:terrybogard4
It is a special tower with 8 3.5 drive bays and another 4 CD rom bays. I use the 8 bays and two of the CD bays for my HD's, in the other two bays I have a DVD burner and a CD burner. All IDE bays have fans in front. The two HD's in the CD bays have enough room so that I could fit drive coolers with two fans for each drive. The drives run very cool, only the CPU gets very hot. Regards

Jurgen

 

[TekTippy4U]

As an aside ppl;
Concerning Drive letters and "amount'" of Drives/Volumes - NOT concerning Physical HDD.

I stumbled onto this in my web adventures
---------------------------------
Volume mount points are robust against system changes that occur when hardware devices are added to or removed from a computer. You are no longer limited to the number of volumes you can create based on the number of drive letters.

Unlike earlier versions of the Windows operating system, the storage system in Windows 2000 is not limited to 26 file system volumes. A new mechanism called volume mount points allows administrators to mount a file system to an NTFS directory instead of (or as well as) as a drive letter.

Volume mount points are directories that point to specified volumes in a persistent manner. The directory that hosts the mount point must be NTFS since the underlying mechanism uses NTFS reparse points. However the file system that is being mounted can be FAT, FAT32, NTFS, CDFS, or UDFS.
---------------------------------
snipped from about 7/8 the way down this page, located under
"Windows 2000 Volume Mount Points"
On This "Everything Win2K" Page

TT4U

Notification:
These are just my thoughts....and should be carefully measured against other opinions.
Backup All Important Data/Docs

 

[tonyajh]

Please help keep getting cd rom message " pleas insert disk"
when there is one installed tried most things.

brum

windows me

samsung

 

[TekTippy4U]

Hi Tonyajh;
Probably should start a New thread yourself, as your issue is different, and it's more suitable to one of these forums;
Forum602
PC Hardware - General Discussion
or Forum750
PC Hardware - Peripheral Issues
please also add some more specific information about your system and problem when posting.

- when the problem started occuring
- any software you've added or removed recently
- any hardware you've added or removed recently
- laptop or desktop
- OS info (good- i see ME )
- System specs (RAM CPU speed)
- Concerning CD drives (how many others hooked up and how)
- Concerning HD Drives (same)



TT4U

Notification:
These are just my thoughts....and should be carefully measured against other opinions.
Backup All Important Data/Docs