Any Limit to Amount of Hard Drives ?

Tarquin BA · Nov 18, 2007

Is there a limit on the amount of hard drives and / or storage space on a computer ?

I'm using an AMD 64, 1.8ghz (msi board) with XP Pro (sp2). I have 5 hard drives in it. One SATA and 4 IDEs. A couple of them are divided into more than one volume so they appear as if there were more hard drives than there actually are.

Once in a while one or more of them become inacessible, and disappear from 'my computer'. Checking them under Computer Management sometimes shows them to be unreadable.

The last time it happened I fixed the problem by disconnecting all but the operating system drive, then reconnecting them one by one, until they were all recognised again.

It's just happened again. I restarted the computer a few times and the vanished drive was back, so I ran the error checking facility on it. This seemed to work ok, so I started a defrag. (the drive was just over three quarters full). This stopped at 28%, and I left it for a few hours, but nothing else happened.

Someone I mentioned this to a while ago said he thought there might be a limit to the amount of storage space which XP can handle. I don't know if this is true as I'd never heard it before.

Anyone got any thoughts, ideas or suggestions on this ?

tlhudson69 · Nov 20, 2007

Check your power supply! Spinup at start up uses a lot of watts. If you do not have a BEEFY powersupply that might be the problem. (I had this happen to me - irregular random NO-SHOW HDD-- UUGH! drove me crazy for months. I bought new graphic card and therfore needed bigger power supply so i upgraded it to. NO MORE PROBLEMS!! The only limit I have encounterd is I have run out of letters. yes floppy uses A,B hdd-sys C multi card reader uses 8 letters DVD's use 2 letters data drive 1 Video 1 usb 1 camera 1 ect..... PS. I have only hooked all of this up one time just to see what would happen, I got 22 active and vert. drives hooked up. Tried to re-name my jump drive AA and it would not work. Almost pointless but fun.

DavidGP · Nov 20, 2007

Storage space on XP and NTFS explained http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/bb457112.aspx

In a nutshell, its 2TB ( Terabytes ) per volume due to MBR max size, but with Raid or Dynamic Disks you can get past this to a possible 16TB, but as mentioned above at these levels you'll need a small nuclear reactor to power them all and the noise!

But many top end PCs these days come with options of going to 1TB of HD storage space using 2x500GB drives.. I use 4 SATA HDs 2 in Raid0 but do have a 720W PSU as my GFX card eats power.

BUT dont skim on a cheap PSU as its power delivery wont be clean as a a good brand and this could also cause loss of hardware, especially drives.

If you partition drives and have as mentioned a multimedia card reader, some USB storage, then the 24 letters available for HD/USB storage can be used up quickly, also if you use the likes of TweakUI to hide unused driver letters then this can cause a drive to disapear.

Also if plugging in USB hardware, you may tip the power requirements of all hardware and loose a drive...

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Any Limit to Amount of Hard Drives ?

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