How Many Is Too Many Hard Drives completely and utterly overloaded

[ebbinger_413 0]

no it actually doesnt make a lot of noise, and i believe you can download programs that will allow you to have more than that ammount of drives on there by assigning more drive letters (actually numbers or double letters or sumtin...i dont quite remember).

[m3ch4 0]

That amount of drives does sound pretty crazy...it's been suggested to reduce the drives and increase the size and I'd go for that.Unless you have different data on each drive, in which case it would make sense to have all those different drives. Like, one drive for music files, one drive for backup, etc, that way when you go to access the drives you're only pulling specific data from specific drives and not creating a back up of the flow of data (which I guess isn't really a problem, ata/scsi still allow data to flow pretty quick).I like hte idea of just networking a bunch of computers. If each computer has a pretty small case, and one or two drives in it, it works better in my mind, seperate cooling, seperate power, etc. Plus with giga-byte network capabilities it would be quick to access data as well, if that is an issue to people.

[yordan 10]

That I like hte idea of just networking a bunch of computers. If each computer has a pretty small case, and one or two drives in it, it works better in my mind, seperate cooling, seperate power...

Unfortunately, this is not the tendancy today. Today, the tendancy is grouping blades in a single cabinet : 15 two-cpu machines in the same drawar, a single power supply, a single cooling system. And several cabinets in a single rack. So you will have 50 to 75 cpu's on a square meter...

[Casanova1405241497 0]

Yeah I too believe That you Use Single hard disk If 160gb or so and make 8 partitions if you want ..! As thats better than wasting acess time and power..! i never saw someone use 8 hard disks ... its really crazy to think.! But its ok for servers to have multiple hard disks... If you use it for desktop Then just single hard disk is enough.! Iam using two hard disks .Totaling 160gb {ie 80+80 gb}and both have 2-2 partitions {virtually 4 hard disks}I have noticed that sometimes my system goes slow On acessing another drive .. Im getting slow times in 2 drives god knows how is your system!

[yordan 10]

wasting acess time

Nope ! If you have two disks, access time is usually divided by two (30 milliseconds on each disk instead of 30+30=60 milliseconds with a single disk).So, having a lot of disks is great. The only question is if you want to pay the price of noise and electrical power for obtainint it.
Yordan

[m3ch4 0]

Unfortunately, this is not the tendancy today. Today, the tendancy is grouping blades in a single cabinet : 15 two-cpu machines in the same drawar, a single power supply, a single cooling system. And several cabinets in a single rack. So you will have 50 to 75 cpu's on a square meter...

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Yikes, with that much hardware (cpu/hdd) you have to have a pretty killer cooling system and power supply.

 

Heh, my problem is I keep thinking from a single user perspective, instead of looking at it from a business' which would be much more towards that sort of grouping of hardware.

[Moody 0]

Too much harddrives?? I don't know, but if you have much, I would think it's very anoying, cus you don't know what is where and never find anything back. Why don't buy one big of 200 Gigs then? That sounds better to me. I have 1 of 120 gigs, separated in 2, 1 of 20 gig and 1 of 100 gig. On the small one, i put important programs, like windows, office ect. The other one is for games, music ect.

[ebbinger_413 0]

i definatly like having more hard drives instead of one big hard drive with several partitions. first of all, with those several partitions, the drive (to me) seems to slow down a lot. having all those hard drives (with different data on each drive - as sum of you had questioned) it goes a lot faster and smoother transition (especially with three of those drives being scsi ). i am willing to sacrafice quiteness for the speed. and i have no problem with heat, with the ten fans inside of the system it stays at a nice cool 27c. just yesterday i was usuing ghost to back up my data (which i actually do almost everyday - because i am changing everything so often) on one of my ide 20 gigs (i believe 15 gigs was being used) and it was saving the image onto a scsi - it took less than half an hour. i did a test (or so you could say) and went onto my other computer (which is actually networked to my server) and i have two ide in there and i used ghost to back up my system drive (which is a 6 gig but was only using 2 gigs - just windows installed + ghost) and saved the image onto the other 6 gig ide which was empty and it took about 15 minutes just to image 2 gigs of data....compared to 15 gigs but w/e...personally i will always have networks and multiple drives instead of partitions. it is faster!

[Dr. 0]

How amny is to many? I believe there's no limit to the amount you can have, you just gotta know what your gonna do with them. Like for instance, Companies... Use them for hosting and ETC.Others use them for space, And they usually get the biggest they can and barely use even a 1/16th. Some just go and buy them because they can, and never use them. Uh, Yea, I believe you can have as many as you want, just don't overload in space and have no memory... xP

[iGuest 3]

Eight hard drives? That's crazy.. You only need 4 at most. And each can just be about 200 gigs at most too. 8 is just 4 too many. I find myself finding it hard to fill up both my 240 hard drives. So if you ever get full... I'll be wondering what you're downloading. Maybe you have the entire internet downloaded there or something. BTW, how much did everything cost, including any thing else we should maybe know about that you're keeping from us. Like the other 2 external hard drives.

[yordan 10]

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...

[ebbinger_413 0]

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 :blink: i am the mannow i have a total of -3 40 gig hard drives-3 9 gig scsi hard drives-2 20 gig hard drivesand 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

[kam1405241509 0]

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).

[yordan 10]

I have approx 1000 CDRs

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

[kam1405241509 0]

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

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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!!