Max number of harddrives?

Question

Im trying to build a PVR and i want to know the maximum number of gigs i can add to a computer.

Answer 1

How much money do you want to spend? All computers can have 2 internal hardrives. Some I think can even have more. And you can have almost unlimited external ones using usb ports.

Answer 2

You want to know what the maximum number of HDD's your computer can physically support? Or you want to know how big of HDD's your computer can support? Or both? Well anyway, 99.99% of computers can support a maximum of 2 HDD's without any modifications and most modern computers can support HDD's up to 750 GB (x2 = 1.5 TB!). HOWEVER, if you are interested in creating a monster machine that is simply storage in a box for whatever reason, you will need to buy something called a HDD controller that plugs into your PCI port (if you have one available). You may then add 2 more HDD's. The problem is that Windows and most likely your CMOS will not be able to recognize or handle these extra drives. So, if you want an easy answer that's definitive, I don't have one! HA! But seriously, about 1.5 TB is going to be about the maximum storage capacity you can have with todays systems.

Answer 3

Using IDE you can have 2 devices connected to each IDE bus...in a typical computer (with 2 IDE busses) you can have 4 devices, keep in mind DVD/CD drives also contribute to this number. SATA can have significantly more (I think it's 8 per SATA bus...someone correct me if i'm wrong). I would suggest the maximum HD amount you have is 1TB...spread out in 250 GB hard drives. You might also want to look into RAID 1 for the drives, this will keep a copy of the data on one drive on another one. It means you halve the storage capacity, but you still have the data if a hard drive fails. In a PVR, this is more likely to happen as PVRs are very unforgiving with hard drives. You might also look into NAS (Network Attached Storage) for long term storage of recordings.

Answer 4

No idea what PVR means, but look into RAIDing them.

The maximum data support is 1990 gigabytes. Don't think there is a physical hard drive limitation though aside from the number of IDE's you have.

Answer 5

You can go for the ultra high-end hard drives that holds approximately 750GB.

In short, the amount of connectors on your motherboard, and the number of expansion slots.

Your computer will support as many drives as your motherboard will support and the number of PCI expansion slots your have. You can buy add-on ATA or SATA adapters from just about any computer store and plug it into an expansion slot and plug any drive into it. I'm not so sure about how many expansion cards you can add.

Answer 6

assuming a PVR is a PC...

you can have a total of 4 ide devices connected to the motherboard. that includes CDROMs/DVDROMs. If you have serial ATA connectors add those to the total. If you really want to get out of control, you can get PCI cards that allow you to add even more.

Answer 7

In short: the number of hard drive connectors available on your motherboard.

Of course there are tons of various ways to get around this ... but with 2 big hard drives you should be fine.

Also note - some systems refuse to recognize hard drives past a certain size depending on how your hd is formatted.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems#Limits

Hope this helps!

Answer 8

a normal mother board will accept two HDs whatever max size the motherboard supports unless you put a raid controller, then u may add more

Answer 9

It depends on your operating system, and your motherboard.

So, without that information you will not get a correct answer here.

Answer 10

as much as you want or as much as the machine can take.