Windows 7 HDD limitations

[andrew911tt]

Are there any limits to how many HDD you can put in a Windows 7 box, or how big a HDD can be.

For example if you had a motherboard with 50 sata ports on can you have all 50 2TB drives show up as one large 100TB drive or have all 50 drives be individually named?

Thanks

 

[Phate]

from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS

In theory, the maximum NTFS volume size is 264−1 clusters. However, the maximum NTFS volume size as implemented in Windows XP Professional is 232−1 clusters. For example, using 64 KiB clusters, the maximum NTFS volume size is 256 TiB minus 64 KiB. Using the default cluster size of 4 KiB, the maximum NTFS volume size is 16 TiB minus 4 KiB. (Both of these are vastly higher than the 128 GiB limit lifted in Windows XP SP1.) Because partition tables on master boot record (MBR) disks only support partition sizes up to 2 TiB, dynamic or GPT volumes must be used to create bootable NTFS volumes over 2 TiB.

So yes, I think you could have a 100TB volume. Doesn't seem wise though.

I think that after windows uses up the alphabet for naming the drives you have to mount new drives in folders.

 

[andrew911tt]

That is for NTSF in windows xp, but does windows 7 treat them the same way?

 

[Neb]

That is for NTSF in windows xp, but does windows 7 treat them the same way?

Yes. They're essentially the same NTFS albeit with a few slight changes, but they are still compatible with each other and as such their limits are still the same.

Do note, however that you won't be able to span all 50 drives within the same dynamic disk as the limit is 32. Yes, this article addresses Win2k3, but I have yet to see anything contrary to that limit. Additionally the Microsoft recommended maximum number of drives that you can put inside a dynamic disk also happens to be 32. Ignore the size limits stated in the article as you can get around that by using GPT

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc773268(WS.10).aspx

 

[andrew911tt]

Thank you