Can I have to many external hard drives?

amarinelli

Baseband Member
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I have a question is it possible to have to many external hard drives on my PC right now I have 5 I added one the other day and I had some problems the monitor flashed a couple of times and then the computer restarted I then shut down and removed one of the external hard drives my system is a i7 16 gb ram I was just wondering if I was somehow overloading the memory
 
you can have as many harddrives as letters in the alphabet.
And beyond that there are workarounds.

I don't think overloading the memory have anything to do with it.
Is it a brand new drive?
Also why do you have 6 harddrives in your computer. It adds heat and noice
Do you really need that much space, or do you have a mix of low capacity drives.
I know a guy who refuses to throw out harddrives, he just adds more when he need more space.
He has like 6-7 in his system and still only like 3 TB in total
 
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I don't know what the actual max number of drives is that you could have, once you hit 26 (max letters in the alphabet) then you need to take other steps.

However, there are practical limits. For instance, if these are internal drives, adding an additional drive may exceed the capacity of your PSU and cause issues. You may need to add a beefier PSU.

If these are USB drives and you are trying to power them from the USB bus, then you could exceed the capacity of what power the USB bus can provide. If you use drives that have their own power supply then that shouldn't be an issue.
 
you can have as many harddrives as letters in the alphabet.
And beyond that there are workarounds.

I don't think overloading the memory have anything to do with it.
Is it a brand new drive?
Also why do you have 6 harddrives in your computer. It adds heat and noice
Do you really need that much space, or do you have a mix of low capacity drives.
I know a guy who refuses to throw out harddrives, he just adds more when he need more space.
He has like 6-7 in his system and still only like 3 TB in total
Thank you very much for your response I know its a lot but I do wedding photography and everything is backed up 3 times for at least two years and I separate weddings and engagement sessions

---------- Post added at 01:27 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:25 PM ----------

I don't know what the actual max number of drives is that you could have, once you hit 26 (max letters in the alphabet) then you need to take other steps.

However, there are practical limits. For instance, if these are internal drives, adding an additional drive may exceed the capacity of your PSU and cause issues. You may need to add a beefier PSU.

If these are USB drives and you are trying to power them from the USB bus, then you could exceed the capacity of what power the USB bus can provide. If you use drives that have their own power supply then that shouldn't be an issue.
Thank you for replying they are all external back ups with there own power supply I use that many for my wedding photography business
 
I know its a lot but I do wedding photography and everything is backed up 3 times for at least two years

Are you using any Raid setup?
Raid 5 or 6 are gonna save you a lot of space. Then you don't need 2 extra backup copies of every photo.

You could also invest in a NAS server.
since you have a business and require a lot of storage capacity a NAS server might be a great investment.
It's more professional in my opinion.
 
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Are you using any Raid setup?
Raid 5 or 6 are gonna save you a lot of space. Then you don't need 2 extra backup copies of every photo.

You could also invest in a NAS server.
since you have a business and require a lot of storage capacity a NAS server might be a great investment.
It's more professional in my opinion.
Great advice I am going to look into both of these options!

---------- Post added at 05:02 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:00 PM ----------

You should try permanent storage like burning DVDs along with your drives.
Great suggestion after 2 years I make two copies of everything on DVD and the remove them from all the Hard drives
 
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