I was loking at the different RAIDs to learn more about running one and under RAID 0 on Wikipedia it says that you can only run 24 HDs in Windows, but I don't think the're right. What WOULD happen if you added a 25th disc? Would it be like Disc AA or go to numbers or what?
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What happens when you add the 25th HD to Windows?
- Thread starter N1NJA
- Start date
- Joined
- Mar 3, 2005
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- Spokane, WA
Interesting. This would be easy to test with virtual drives and flash drives. I'm up to drive P: now with all my virtual drives enabled and my thumb drives plugged in. I might try it....
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2005
You can have 24 nonremovable volumes with letters in NT derivatives (C through Z). Letters A & B are reserved for floppies, or, if you don't have floppies, removable drives of other types (external drives, flashcards, ZIP, etc.). There is no drive AA, CC, DD, etc. Mapped network drives, disks with multiple mounted partitions, etc., all count towards the letter limit when they're assigned one.
If you're really intent on having that many drives in your system and need to add more, mount the volume onto a folder, as you would in a UNIX derivative (e.g. /mnt/media ~= C:\volumes\media, which are filesystems on some specified drive; see this MSKB article).
Just to be clear, this isn't a limit on the number of drives, rather the number of volumes mounted onto drive letters. You can have far more than 25, but eventually the drive letters run out and folders become the mount points.
If you're really intent on having that many drives in your system and need to add more, mount the volume onto a folder, as you would in a UNIX derivative (e.g. /mnt/media ~= C:\volumes\media, which are filesystems on some specified drive; see this MSKB article).
Just to be clear, this isn't a limit on the number of drives, rather the number of volumes mounted onto drive letters. You can have far more than 25, but eventually the drive letters run out and folders become the mount points.
- Thread Starter
- #4
I used the 31 virtual drives from Alcohol 120% and once it hit Z it went to this super long string of numbers, but I think it was an error bacause it wouldnt boot unless in safe mode. I don't have enough stuff to try an actual hardware setup though, which was why I was asking.
- Joined
- Mar 17, 2004
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- Lawrenceville, Georgia
I figure either A) windows will freak out and call the FBI on you. <M$ Mentality>Anybody who could possibly needs that many drives in a single computer must be a pirate</M$ Mentality> or B ) Drive letters will start overwriting each other.
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2006
- Location
- Calgary, Alberta
Snugglebear said:
what he said.
Plus if you seriously needed that many drives you can do 1 of 2 things.
1) remove letters from the inactive drives you have and apply it to one of the other ones(big pain)
2) go out and buy Linux as it can have twice as many i believe.... i forget this is from a networking class awhile ago. i tried to forget that class.
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2005
With UNIX derivatives you can adjust the limit to how many filesystems can be simultaneously mounted. Each one requires a superblock, so the various kernels will have a limit somewhere in there that can be changed as necessary. On linux derivatives you want to hit /proc/sys/fs/super-max to see the limit. Often this is 256 by default. I'm having major brain constipation on the BSDs and Solaris this afternoon. Anyway, not having drive letters is definitely a bonus; it provides much greater freedom as an administrator, allowing you to hide the actual configuration of the system from the users.
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