# Maximum hard drive recognition in windows?



## douglatins (Aug 7, 2010)

I have a friend that is triyng to connect 12 HDDs in his comp and cant seem to work, in comp manag he can only see 9. Is there a maximum number of partitions? some limitation we dont know about? Anyone with buttloads of data have encountered something like this?


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## newtekie1 (Aug 7, 2010)

AFAIK, there shouldn't be a limit on the number of drives, I know you should be able to have one at least for each letter of the alphabet(minus A and B), so 24 at least.


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## Perseid (Aug 7, 2010)

I think it's more likely to be a motherboard limitation than Windows. I think you can even have more than 24 drives with XP and up because you can start assigning them to folders if you have to. 

Also, I have 10 drives working on my system now. Some of them are USB, though.


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## AsRock (Aug 7, 2010)

newtekie1 said:


> AFAIK, there shouldn't be a limit on the number of drives, I know you should be able to have one at least for each letter of the alphabet(minus A and B), so 24 at least.



I believe you can use A and B too lol.

There is a partition limit per drive 3-4 i believe ( unless that's raid only )..

Maybe it's the power usage at start up thats a issue so maybe there is a option to allow more time for detection in the bios.


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## 3volvedcombat (Aug 7, 2010)

On some Servers and stuff for raid

Ive seen this way were you needed a 750watt tx power supply- and you configured every drive to spin up and start 1 buy 1- there were 20 2tb drivers in the system on a ATX Phenom II quad core motherboard.

Just used some sata raid cards to get it going for mass storage


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## Solaris17 (Aug 7, 2010)

enable staggered spinup. see if that helps. and dont forget that you might need to initilize some of the drives in the admin tools.


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## MohawkAngel (Aug 7, 2010)

Limit on IDE cable are 2 per connector on mobo. Sata are 1 per connector.


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## Mussels (Aug 7, 2010)

douglatins said:


> I have a friend that is triyng to connect 12 HDDs in his comp and cant seem to work, in comp manag he can only see 9. Is there a maximum number of partitions? some limitation we dont know about? Anyone with buttloads of data have encountered something like this?



how is he connecting them? some motherboards 'share' sata and E-sata ports for example, so if you enable the E-sata in the BIOS, some SATA ports disable. the manual will state which.

also, if he's using E-sata is he using port multipliers? because not every SATA controller plays nice with those.


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## douglatins (Aug 7, 2010)

I will share this info with him, will update with more, i know that he uses E-sata too


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