Hard Drive Limits

[Sandcrab]

Does anyone know the limit for number of hard drives connected to a single computer using Windows OS (XP Pro in this particular instance) ? What happens when all 26 letters of the alphabet are used up ? Does it revert to double letters (e.g. AA, AB, AC, etc.) or some other method of denoting the drives, or does the system just refuse to recognize the new device ?

[Krell]

You can not exceed that naming convention, and I do not advise pushing the limits of it. XP does better at handling this that W98 or NT, but your asking for trouble if you try to load up each drive letter.

Your question about refusing to recognise a new device would only be valid, if you used up the alphabet before you added another IDE device, and when you formatted it, and had to assign a proper drive letter, there would be none to chose from.


http://www.anandtech.com/guides/viewfaq.html?i=108

[d3ft0n3s]

but if you have a boot hard drive and raid controllers cant you have like 20 some hard drive letters each containing 8 harddrives. mayb eim confused but i know you can do a single letter with 8 drives in a RAID mode. it was on tech TV where they had a terabyte of free space.

[Jelsoft]

Originally posted by Sandcrab
Does anyone know the limit for number of hard drives connected to a single computer using Windows OS (XP Pro in this particular instance) ? What happens when all 26 letters of the alphabet are used up ? Does it revert to double letters (e.g. AA, AB, AC, etc.) or some other method of denoting the drives, or does the system just refuse to recognize the new device ?

Off hand, I believe that you can connect only 23 drives on Windows. So the last drive will be Z.

Then again why would you want to connect 23 drives on Windows?

[Induna]

Do you mean physical drives or logical drives?

You can have 23 logical drives in an extended partition.

A: and B: is allocated for the floppy drives, C: is for the primary drive.

[Sandcrab]

Krell - one is 120GB IDE (partitioned into 20/100GB), four are on a RAID (striped - two 120GB appear as one drive, the other two as separate drives - dunno why - they just set up that way when I installed as striped). The RAID is integral with the motherboard. Also have 6 120GB, 2 80GB and 2 160GB hooked up as externals on USB 2.0 rig - Total of 15 actual drives and 15 virtual.

Jelsoft - I have a lot of music files.

Also have a CD-ROM and a CD-RW which takes up two more letters - which (apparently) means I only have 6 left. I think things are going to get interesting late this year or early next year.

[Krell]

Yes, you have 6 left

I hope your using one hella power supply

[Sandcrab]

650W - but the USB drives all have external power supplies.

[Krell]

Throw is that Nitrogen cooling, and youre set!

oooops I hear a bird chirp and see a hint of daylight, gotta go.

[Sandcrab]

Does anyone know the limit for number of hard drives connected to a single computer using Windows OS (XP Pro in this particular instance) ? What happens when all 26 letters of the alphabet are used up ? Does it revert to double letters (e.g. AA, AB, AC, etc.) or some other method of denoting the drives, or does the system just refuse to recognize the new device ?

AND THE ANSWER IS:

You are limited to the number of USB devices connected to that computer (max of 127, I believe) plus the number of IDE devices the computer is capable of handling.

Once you all letters of the alphabet have been taken, each new hard drive is added as a new volume to an existing drive (you choose) - simply add a folder to the chosen drive and XP formats and activates the new drive as a new volume in that folder.

[shawners]

take out the small drives, and upgrade to larger drives =)

[Vlet]

You could also set up NTFS drives to mount onto a folder on another NTFS partition.

Create a folder on your C drive (as long as it's NTFS) called "Data 1". (mind you, these instructions are for Windows 2000, as I have no experience with Windows XP, but I know that XP also supports this feature - the actual control panel names may be a bit different) Go to your "Computer Management" console (in "Administrative Tools", and click on the "Disk Management". Find the drive you want to add, right click on it and click "Change Drive Letter and Path". In there, you can remove whatever drive letter it is assigned to, click add, and use the "Mount to this NTFS folder..." option to mount it to "C:\Data 1"

This way, you won't be using up any more drive letters :) You could create a folder called C:\Data\ and in that create a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.

[Sandcrab]

take out the small drives, and upgrade to larger drives =)

Define "small drives." Smallest one in the farm is 80GB (2ea) - the rest are a mishmash of 120/160/200GB.

[Sandcrab]

You could also set up NTFS drives to mount onto a folder on another NTFS partition.

Create a folder on your C drive (as long as it's NTFS) called "Data 1". (mind you, these instructions are for Windows 2000, as I have no experience with Windows XP, but I know that XP also supports this feature - the actual control panel names may be a bit different) Go to your "Computer Management" console (in "Administrative Tools", and click on the "Disk Management". Find the drive you want to add, right click on it and click "Change Drive Letter and Path". In there, you can remove whatever drive letter it is assigned to, click add, and use the "Mount to this NTFS folder..." option to mount it to "C:\Data 1"

This way, you won't be using up any more drive letters :) You could create a folder called C:\Data\ and in that create a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.

You are absolutely correct, sir. That's basically what I (thought) said up above, the only difference being that I used up all the drive letters before going to the folder solution. All drives on this particular computer are NTFS.

[stts]

W2k, Fat32, 14-200gigers formated Fat32, 2-Cd burrners, 1Floppy, oh and 2 USB ports all useing 470Watt supply. No raids cause I hate losing everying when a stripe fails. Also no NTFS because there are very few options to corruption recovery. With Fat32 there are a miriad of progies that gurantee I get something back. Even if I have to use diskedit and get it myself. I am a "Large File" nut with a kind shareing heart. :santa

[Killawat]

You could merge every 3 drives.