i have a total of eight hard drives in my computer i am very happy to say that. i have a server case, duh. three of the hard drives are scsi each drive is 9 gigs...yeah i know...so thats 18 gigs total. then i have four ide hard drives which is 2 20 gigs and 2 6 gigs for a total of 52 gigs...so 18 + 52 is 70 gigs yeah ....then i have a mac hard drive in there that is only 1 gig...i use that for my paging file...so 8 hard drives for a total of around 70 gigs. then i have an ide controller with 2 cd drives on there (one burner the other just a cd drive) and i have a cd scsi drive in there as well...my case is totally full...not to mention that i tossed ten fans into the thing. i have a cpu fan, three in the front of the case, one on the side of the case, three in the power supply, and two on the back of the case. it is a wonderfull system that is dual booted with xp and vista beat.


is that crazy everyone thinks so...yeah...even i do...

How many is too many hard drives ? No limit, I would say. As long as your computer is not slowed down because of too many disc controllers compared to number of processors, I would say there is no limit.
I have seen professional systems with up to one thousand drives (yes, 1000 drives), the customer had quite a lot of data and wanted the cpu's to never wait for the disks. And the customer never complained he had too many drives.
Of course, for home users, with the current systems available, I would say that a sigle 160 Gig disk or two 80 Gig disks seems enough.

Is there a law of diminishing value with that many hard drives?

I have a beautiful Compaq Proliant 3000 Server with a 7-disk-Hotplug-SCSI-Raid, it's pretty cool and real fast, BUT the whole **** is LOUD and uses a lot of VOLTAGE. So I agree with yordan that for the average user it would be better (and cheaper) to have one 160 GB disk than having 8 20 GB disks.

I think systems like yours make sense if you're doing a lot of back-up stuff, or if you're running a RAID for performance or data security reasons. But I do very much understand that you love your box.

GreetingZ

Too many disks is when your wasting more money on running costs than is needed, for example you may have 10 hard disks each with 10GB, now that may be a lot of data storage but if you never cross 50GB, then is there a real need for the extra 50GB? They are wasting power and really doing nothing and adding to the computers perfomace degrading. So basically use as many as you want, theres 13 hard disks in my schools server all doing something and right now running into space limitations which will be solved probably by an extra users server.

As usual, when you buy 1000 things at the same time : you ask 60% discount, if it does not work you go to the next provider, if you aren't successfull you issue an international call for tender...

I've got my own desktop and another that i just mess around with and a box full of junk parts and stuff that i use to put up the messed up Windows 98 computer. I plugged in like 3 hard drives once to that computer and it didn't do me much (Duh! I NEVER use it?). But yes the computer runs an old Athlon processor and requires lots of cooling. Guess what i did? I removed the bottom lid and replaced it with one that has the ventilation holes in it then i placed my case over the Air conditioning vent. The temperature of my room definitely went up but in any case i have a very cold computer to work with. Is something wrong with the picture? Is my computer going to have frostbite?

Well ... if you can find practical (or even just fun) uses for all that storage space, then I don't guess it's too much. If you aren't knocking over little old ladies and stealing their purses for money to buy more hard drives, then cool. *grins*

But, my personal preference is to just do one or two medium-sized hard drives and use flash storage or CD-Rs for the rest of my data. I'm lazy and don't have a whole lot of money to spend on computer stuff...and because I move around at least twice a year (college student), 100 percent portability is vital to me.

Hence, the laptop with 30 gigs of HD space and the 128 MB flash drive, plus the tons and tons of CD-Rs.

Not to mention the online storage solutions.

I think you have too many drives when you can't remember where you put stuff... I have 2 hard drives right now: a 36 GB Western Digital Raptor 10,000 RPM Serial ATA (soon to be 2 in RAID 0), and an old 40 GB ATA drive that I use for backups and Linux. The Raptor gets excellent performance, and I like to put all my music on the old HDD so I'm not putting overhead on the drive I run my programs off of.

yeah it is a lil crazy, it uses more power than just 1 70GB hard drive. It would be smarter and probably safer to get bigger Hard Drives.