csamuels said:
if you want to use more than 26 physical hard drives, research raid configs, san arrays, or nas devices
csamuels, that's not really delldude's question. If you have RAID, you can put two (or more) drives together to be, say, drive B:. But say you have 26 RAID stacks. Same limitation.
delldude4100, what you need to ask yourself is 1: why would you need to do this? and 2: what would be the performance limitations of such a setup?
Say you could get 26 devices connected up to a PC. It's theoretically possible, if you have a mobo with enough expansion slots for all the controller cards you'll need to add (about 6 I think). What do you do with all those drives? Hosting farms and data-storage-centers don't have PC's with 26 drives in them. They've got 26 PC's with a couple large drives in each, linked on a network.
If you need on-site mass storage (like, at your own personal workstation) then you get a mass-storage solution, like a terabyte tower or a second box with a dedicated RAID stack.
In short, there's no practical reason why anyone would cram 27 drives into a single box.
As for theory, I'm unable to remember whether this is a hard-limitation or just an impractical spec that no one has bothered with before. I know you can't do this in Windows, because the GUI is coded for drive letters A through Z. Microsoft correctly assumed that the mass majority (if not all, as it is) would not have 26 drives in their PC's. Linux users will probably fire up about now and tout that Linux can do this and thus they are superior...but since no one cares to do this, no one cares.
I suppose you could spend some time blitzing through the web for this info, but I wouldn't get my hopes up.