XP hard disk number limitation...

[chunkyman]

HI,

I need a storage system in the 16terabyte range.
I got quoted from HP and IBM but the cost is wayyy tooo high for our budget.

So I have decided to build around 5 servers with heaps of 500GB hard disks.

I was just wondering if anybody ever tried this and if Windows XP has a limitation on the number of disks it can access.

Thanks

 

[vacunita]

I'd be more worried, about how to power that amount of drives, and how to keep them at a functional temperature. That many drives can produce serious heat and require large amounts of power.

Depending on how you plan on setting the drives, will be how windows will react to them. If you plan on getting several drives into a single volume or having them each be independent.

Windows can assign drive letters up to the letter Z: (somehow i think it can assign double drive letters to some extent, all though I'm not entirely positive).

In any case your are talking of 32 500GB drives. If you combine them into 1Tb volumes or even 2Tb volumes Windows should have no problem assigning them drive letters. Although I don't think it can handle a 16Tb volume

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Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[chunkyman]

Hi and thanks for your input.
If I have 6 hard disks in each server, I do not think that would cause too much of a hassle for a 500W PSU surely.
Heat could be a problem but I guess it could be solved with proper air-cooling.
I heard a little bit about creating dynamic disks in XP, do you know anything about this??

regards

 

[Grenage]

I think I'd have to question whether XP is the right operating system for a group of servers.

"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area" - Major Mike Shearer

 

[chunkyman]

Well, I do not need any security overkill like 2003 server offers, that's why I chose XP.
I think it has less overhead than 2003, wouyldt you agree??

 

[vacunita]

You can use XP's dynamic Disk facility to create a single volume from 2 or more Hard rives.

A Volume would be a Storage unit, that from a user standpoint is a single drive although it can be comprised of various physical drives.

You can have a 2TB volume from 4 500MB drives or a 3TB volume from 6 500MB drives.

what types of drives are you planning on using? IDE, SATA, SCSI?

Are you planning on any add-on cards for the extra drives. I'd be surprised if you can find a motherboard that can accommodate 6 hard drives. 4 hard drives should not be a problem, if you don't plan on having any optical drives that would take up a slot.

----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[chunkyman]

to put you in the picture I am planning to use this system to record cctv feeds from various clients.These fields will be coming over dsl. I was thinking of a mixture of SATA and PATA (pata to make use of at least ONE drive on the onboard IDE cont.) M/B's with 4 sata's are common so that gives me 5 drives x 500GB = 1.5TB. Id I add a single SATA pci cont it will take me up to 3.5Tb per server which I think is a bit more than enough

 

[vacunita]

Each server would have an additional OS drive that would be independent of the storage drives.

You should be thinking of some backup methods also. you wouldn't want to have one of the drives in a volume fail, and the whole thing goes up in smoke.

If you can get the Drives to function as a dynamic disk spanned volume it should work.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314343

I'd go for the One IDE drive as the OS drive.
And have the SATA drives be your spanned volume.

You will have to be very careful with the cooling. So all drives have proper ventilation. you should try to add additional fans to maximize air flow. Also whatever room you put them in would be better if it had temperature control so you set it to a brisk 55F to keep everything cool. That many servers with that many drives are going to be producing a lot of heat.



----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[roo0047]

Scalable to up to 20TB for HD multi-stream support:

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/08/5-terabyte-driv.html

FROM

http://www.lacie.com/us/company/news/news.htm?id=10337:

"A Windows XP partition limitation does not allow the configuration of Big with more than 2TB. This limitation does not exist for Mac® OS X or Windows® Vista™ and Windows Server 2003."

 

[ArizonaGeek]

I have 6 hard disks on my computer at home. I use an Antec Nine Hundred computer case which has room for all 6 drives and has two very nice 120mm fans blowing over the drives (I have 5 fans total in my case) to keep everything cool. I have an Abit AB9-Pro motherboard which offers a RAID 5 configuration. I have a 200 gig main OS drive, two 250 gig drives in a RAID 0 and three 400 gig drives in a RAID 5. With my mother board I could use up to six drives in a RAID 5 config.

All of my drives are SATA and I am running Vista Ultimate.

I don't think Windows has a limitation of how many drives you can have but like everyone else said you are going to be limited by power and by heat. Five PC's running heaps of 500 gig drives are going to generate a LOT of heat. I live in a desert (supposed to be 108 degrees F today) so I am always battling the heat issue but this Antec case is awesome. I just got it about 3 weeks ago and so far it has been keeping things nice and cool.

Cheers
Rob

The answer is always "PEBKAC!

 

[JimInKS]

I don't know what software you are using or how many cameras we are talking about.

I have a system with 16 ip cameras on a LAN using AXIS cameras and software. I built a PC with a dual core AMD processor and 3 SATA 250G hard drives. I use 1 HD for the OS (XP Pro) and the other 2 to record video. The software allows you to assign a camera to a hard drive for recording purposes, so I have 8 cameras recording to each HD. I only record cameras with motion from 2 to 5 frames per second and this setup allows me to easily keep the last 2 weeks of images. I run this system headless (no monitor or keyboard) and just use VNC remote desktop as a console. You could do this or get a KVM switch. The camera software allows me to run a client on my PC that I can use to watch the video and manage the video system.

Recording doesn't necessarily take a lot of CPU, but it does add up. Searching the stored video can be especially cpu intensive, not to mention i/o intensive. The software recommends a dual core 3GHZ CPU for 25 cameras. 25 is the max number of cameras a single system can manage.

One of the problems is bandwidth as video is a real hog even on a LAN. I noticed that you will be using a DSL connection. With a single connection you will be severely limited on how much data you can receive.

I don't think that you will need 16T of live storage with that low a bandwidth connection. If you are archiving many many days worth of video I would think about using some USB hard drives for archiving your live video.

The software I am using (by AXIS) allows an archiving option that I think you could set up to go to the external Hard drive(s). When they get full just put it on a shelf and get another.

Hope this helps. I know I made a lot of assumptions as I don't know your exact situation. This is just one solution that seems to be working for me.

 

[JimInKS]

Oops, just noticed the original post is a month old!