more than 26 drives

[IBMan]

prolly a stupid question since like....10 people in the nation hav ever thought of it, but what happens after your comptuer has 26 drives...a-z...wat happens if u add another drive or partition?

 

[NeoExtreme]

Windows is not able to handle more than 26 drives because of the limitations of drive letters A-Z,if you wish to have more than 26 then you would not be able to assign it a drive letter you would have to mount the volume in a folder of another drive.

 

[amit jain]

wat if i put a hard disk in parallel to another already having 26 drives.. then the same answer will not work....

 

[SkyHi]

You could probably rename them, not just right click and rename, but through my computer some how. I've done it before (not the more than 26 drives, but renaming) and it works fine.

-SkyHi

 

[office politics]

if you want to use more than 26 physical hard drives, research raid configs, san arrays, or nas devices

 

[SHAWN]

Or you can RAID them into 1 drive with 1 letter no?

 

[ShoobieRat]

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.

 

[xotix]

isn't drive letter A and B reserved for floppy??? so could you assign a hard drive to be those letters???

 

[desiboi]

26 DRIVES!!!!!!!! It's possible, with Windows, but theres a problem, where are you going to get a case for that?

 

[ShoobieRat]

26 DRIVES!!!!!!!!
Originally posted by xotix
floppy??? letters???

What is it? Extreme-Punctuation Day?

It's possible, with Windows

It's possible to put 26 drives under Windows, but I think the real question should be "Why?".

but theres a problem, where are you going to get a case for that?

Not that anyone would really want to do this, but if you did, you could just get a large server case, which should easily hold 26 drives. You'd have to tap in a few more brackets to hold them, but otherwise it wouldn't be a problem.