Multi Hard drive tower

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objecterror

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Need to know something, is it possible to set up more then 1 terabyte of internal hard drive space. and if so, what kind of case, mobo and proc. would i need for such a setup?

It's not a matter of personal reasons, its an idea that popped into my head, cause, instead of going a external hard drive route, i'd like to keep multiple hard drives running and be easily accessible and i want to know how this could be accomplished.

Any information and post would be great.
 
yes.
most cases hold at least 3-4 hard drives

the biggest single hard drive I've seen is a 750GB drive from Seagate.
it's a great drive. also faster than other 7200RPM drives.

2 x 750GB Seagate drives = 1.5TB
and you only need two bays
 
i was also wondering if all current motherboards recognize up to 1terabyte of hdd space.
 
I think you can have as much space as you want as long has you have enough hard drives and places to plug them in on your board.
 
^WRONG^

Some old motherboards doesn't support that much, Infact I think there is still SOME problems for memory controllers[especially on intel part as far as I remember at 1AM] with anything over 320GB... but I might be wrong...

-Jo.
 
Saint71 said:
I think you can have as much space as you want as long has you have enough hard drives and places to plug them in on your board.

thanks for the quick replies, see, there are server towards but i don't want anything that large. and the 4x250 was something i started to do, but i have an ASUS SLI premieum board(sp) and, there are two SATA ports on it, one for Raid and another for the 3.0gbs wire. In my tower i believe i can hold atleast 4 hd's. there are ports for a 3.5'' floppy drive, but i don't know if its worth the trouble of getting one.
 
the relevant hardware barriers are at 32gb and 137gb for recent hardware. previous barriers include 8gb and 512mb. other barriers are software barriers. the 32gb barrier was solved with a BIOS flash as it was a BIOS issue however the 8gb (int13 limit) and 137gb (32bit LBA limit) barriers were adressing issues and were somewhat trickier. they required a rethink of the way hard drive controllers worked. there have been no barriers since the 137gb barrier.

in any case, there are no hardware limits to the total hdd storage that can be adressed to seperate drives as long as there are enough HDD channels that support the capacity of drive being used. however there are software limits for instance the FAT16 file system was limited to 2gb partitions and there were also other windows related barriers.
 
I've got that right now. It just depends on how many places you have to plug it in. Not just on the motherboard, but on your power supply. That was my bottleneck for a while, limiting my ability to add on drives, but I got a new one with plenty of power cables for the hard drives. Also you need to consider how much space you have in your case. If you mix the SATA drives with the IDE ones and you still have enough physical bays and power cables for it you can fit even more drives. This tends to happen if you've just been aquiring drives as you go along.

If your mobo has 2 SATA ports, you'll be able to put 4 devices on that. Do you have some drives already or are you buying all new?

here are a couple of suggestions

4x 320gb drives for a rounded total of 1280gb
$99 each, $396 total
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822136003

3x 400gb drives for a rounded total of 1200gb
$139 each, $417 total
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144423

Both of these scenarios will get you at least 1TB, but I'm not mathy enough to do the figuring on how much it *really* is. Personally I'd go with the 400gb setup. It will take up less space and you'll have more opportunity to expand if you need more capacity later.
 
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