Replying to How Many Is Too Many Hard Drives

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...

alot of hds yes but there all crap

system 1 has 4x 200 gig hdds

wer as my 2nd system has 8x 200gig hdds now that makes me proud

I, myself, have only two in my case, of which one is not connected at all The connected one is 40GB, which is really not enough for me, so I'll probably get a 200GB one.

But check this out. My ISP has a local dc++ hub and one of the operators in that hub has a GIGANTIC share - 1.3TB! Yes, you read well, 1.3 TB!!! He has a lot of HDs connected and also has a shelf with hard drives
Here's a pic of his cases
http://elitehub.us/f...images/comp.jpg

I have 2 HDD
120 GB (ReiserFS, XFS, NTFS, 3 partitions) [Linux, Windows)
80 GB (FAT32, 1 partition) (Bridge Drive)

I don't think there's such thing as "too many" hard discs in the computer.

xboxrulz

I only have the two drives in my main system, but we're in the process of building a storgae server type abomination that will likely have about 4-5 drives once we find ways to attach them all.... currently theres two in there but its a normal old school case so if we add more we'll need to get out the ol originality

I think you have too many drives when you can't remember where you put stuff... 

Amen.

I have too many drives then. I have five or six systems and most of which I swap drives on depending on what I want to do on that particular day. I usually put alot of my web work on one or movies and games on another, then there is one housing my tunes. I have a larger one that does alot of all of that though, being the constant pack rat that I am I like backups. Now being into the mod thing I find I have seperate hard drives for my gaming platforms as well.

I am going to have to start using stickers to identify stuff.

Nice ! If you had lots of more money, you would be client for an optical juke-box device.

He he .. I actually bought a cheap PowerFile jukebox on eBay for 500bucks and I'm in the process of trying to mod it! I did look at those pro jukes and they cost 1000s whilst not being upgradable. I even thought about making my own (there was a guy online with a website about his lego mindstorms autochanger) but the performance (speed of changing) and accuracy/precision of the robot arm wasn't too hot.

Actually, I don't mind changing discs that much, it's really for when I'm at work, it's handy to be able to load a specific disc in to it! With my CDMRW discs, my filesystem actually overflows onto some of these optical discs, so it's sometimes a necessity to load a disc in to run a program even!!

I have approx 1000 CDRs

Nice ! If you had lots of more money, you would be client for an optical juke-box device.

I use a Seagate SCSI drive for my main OS, apps and VM images of other OSs, several (it varies .. they're removable!) WD SATA drives for my data and bootable Rev cartridges for some OS images that I prefer to run outside of my VM app (eWinXP/bartPE or OpenSolaris LiveCD when using some DCC/CAD software .. rather than multi-booting via a bootloader). The former is pretty cool because you can have several "versions" of your OS, similar to Window's backup's rollback, except that it actually keeps writes physically separate, so you can install the main image on a write protected HDD or CDR .. or Rev cartridge!!

For other stuff, I have approx 1000 CDRs (finally moving to DVDRs now ) for things like incremental backup images and videos/movies/etc .. basically things that I don't need online/direct access to all the time! I also sometimes use CDMRWs (Mnt. Rainier) for installing some weird apps that I know I won't use ever again (e.g. just for a piece of work I have to do right now, but once I've done that, I'd probably never need to use it again), or for things that are OK to have really slow access to (for file access across my VPN(SSH)/WAN(DC) connections etc)! Ideally I'd have several optical drives for these tasks but I'll probably wait for BRD before I get a new drive unless I find one for <25bucks! Finally, I sometimes use a microdrive in an external USB-CF reader to move files between remote machines or to old machines that don't have much other than a USB port and floppy drive .

I don't think never knowing where my data is is ever a problem for me. I use a directory lister (there are some pretty good shareware ones on tucows etc) to keep track of my less important files, and diff to see changes. Next year when WinFS beta arrives on NT, and the equivalents on Linux etc, it will probably be less of an issue .. assuming users are happy to spend hours tagging all their files with tons of useful metadata ...!

Most modern drives use FDB, and I think watercooling is quite a nice method of dealing with my noise problems (rather than soundproofing/heating or setting the drive into one of its low-performance silent modes). And the Rev cartridges reduce my potential electricity bill as I don't need to use many OS's at once!

RAID0/5 are nice for handling the throughput needed for AV editing setups & server tasks, but StorageReview.com's forums have some benchmarks discussing and showing that the advantage on desktops (single-threaded, single-used apps) is tiny. So I figured I'd setup the WD's in a simple JBOD instead.

On a slightly off-topic issue, if you really want better access times, perhaps a software ramdrive/cache or hardware SSD (like Gigabyte's 100USD SSD, or the Hyperdrive-III if it's out yet) would help you .. rather than a larger SCSI controller cache. I remember reading a reviewer who had setup their OSs on one of these bootable SSD's, and got nanosecond (memory) access times and high throughput (the HD3 benchmark maxed out the PCI bus it was on at nearly 133MB/s!). Some of these drives have separate power lines, internal batteries, and backup HDDs too. But to me, the cost is still far too high (for RAM), you'd be using memory on a relatively slow PCI/PCIx/PCIe bus, the OS is usually loaded into memory anyway which is faster (although in Linux you can set this to be reduced and to load it off an SSD or FlashRAM drive) ...

SCSI has lower CPU utilisation (hence the "smoothness" ebbinger_413 described) and has the equivalent of NCQ (TCQ) but with larger queues & more complex caching algorithms .. I agree it does feels faster .. but costs much more .

As for partitions vs separate drives, the outer part of an HDD is moving faster "linearly" than the inner tracks, and so has better throughput. You can, to some extent control where data goes on the disk, in some OS's. But perhaps the separate disks benching faster had something to do with this? I have no idea! Personally, I've never seen this noticably faster situation (I've used a similar setup at work many years ago!). It can't be anything to do with disk/controller caches at that size (GB's).

Regarding gbE networked vs SCSI/IDE local drives, if you populate the SCSI channel with four 15k drives at 100MB/s each, that's well over gbE (unless you have a switch with many ports in it), and SAS now has 3gbps per port, with 8port .. all the way to 32port controller cards planned .. and you can connect multiple drives to each port using some extra hardware. There are also external ports for SAS and SATA (eSATA), so personally if I had that many disks (my case is too damn full to fit those in ) then I'd buy an external drive cage with removable trays (I think Addonics had some nice ones for 50usd).

BW, ebbinger_413, have you thought about using bootable Rev disks (since you're changing your setup daily!)? You can get 5 disks for about 100gbp on ebay, and the drive itself sometimes goes for 125gbp for the USB external one. A word of caution though is that you need to use Windows or LiveCDs for the bootable setup (using Iomega's boot-and-run in the former's case).

i love it...i am going through an a+ certification class right now (pointless...i am teaching them **** to begin with) and they have three trainers, with 40 gig hard drives in each. at the end of last year they busted all three trainers....so i went and fixed one, and since all three have the same exact **** in them, i imaged the 40 gig hard drive, restored the image onto three 6 gig hard drives and replaced each 40 gig hard drive with my 6 gig...so i just traded 18 gigs for 120 gigs...and their trainers are fixed plus they have no idea what happened i am the man

now i have a total of

-3 40 gig hard drives
-3 9 gig scsi hard drives
-2 20 gig hard drives

and i am getting a 10 gig a 6 gig and a 2 gig from a friend for 5 bucks...that would be killer008r thasts giving me these...but i had to trade him a 40 gig for a fan so i technically only have 2 40 gigs...its great...i will be putting the 2 40 gigs along with the 2 gig and my scsi into my big tower server (2 gig has os and 2 40 gig and 3 9gig scsi for free space). then i will put the 6 gig and the 2 20 gigs into my mid tower for networked drives....so technically i will have a total of 9 drives...i also have an apple drive that i have to mod into the big tower...dont have time yet...but i will get to it...it is great

I find myself finding it hard to fill up both my 240 hard drives

Nope ! No problem for filling my hard drives. Simply when modifying a strong part of my OS (changing my antivirus software or installing anew firewall) I do a PQDI backup, in order to be able to come back again. This goes drastically up to a large amount of disk space usage. And all my pictures and friend's pictures use quite a lot of space. And I found something even more consuming : a cousin put my pictures in a PowerPoint SlideShow, my ten megs of jpg pictures become several hudreds of megs!
So consuming disk space is not so difficult.

a single user perspective, instead of looking at it from a business'

Sure, but unfortunately I spend rather few time home, a lot of time at work, so like a lot of people I usually think business first...