What happens when more than 26 drives are present?

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Let see, while IDE only handles 8, you can put 15 SCSI drives on a
single card, heck, 2 SCSI cards and you have 30 already. Then there is
the USB option. That was pretty easy. And what prevents the user from
multiple power supplies? There are cases outfitted with dual PSU's so
that doesn't appear to be an issue either.

And another alternative: multiple partitions on a single drive (or a
few drives).

 

[Uwe Sieber]

Install the USBDLM service as described on my page or in the
help file. Go to the folder where you installed it to, create
a new USBDLM.INI.

Enter this:

[DriveLetters1]
Letter1=C:\FlashDrives\Drive


Create the folder C:\FlashDrives
C: must be NTFS formatted.


From now on, if you attach an USB drive it's mounted to
the folder C:\FlashDrives\Drive. The folder 'Drive' is
created by the USBDLM service. If you attach a second
one then USBDLM creates Drive_1, then Drive_2, up to
Drive_99.
The folders stay when the drives are removed. If you want
USBDLM to remove a folder on removal of the drive, add a
setting to the USBDLM.INI:

[Settings]
DeleteMountPointsOnRemoval=1


Mounting into NTFS folders brings some drawbacks, read the
USBDLM_E.CHM help file for more information.



Uwe

 

[Leythos]

With 12 IDE drives, how are they accessed? The IDE spec calls out 4
channels with 2 drives per channel. Or is the external unit handling it
and presenting 2 drives as a single unit?

The drives are setup into 2 arrays of 6 drives each. The sx6000 card
controls everything, RAID-5, and 128MB Cache on the card. Can even hot
swap them and rebuild the array without having to take the server down.


--

Leythos
- Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum.
- Calling an illegal alien an "undocumented worker" is like calling a
drug dealer an "unlicensed pharmacist"
(e-mail address removed) (remove 999 for proper email address)

 

[Uwe Sieber]

Thanks again. How can I find the volume name for a drive? When I go to
drive properties, the name is what the user assigned.

Use a SetupDi enumeration with GUID_DEVINTERFACE_VOLUME.
For each volume call GetVolumeNameForVolumeMountPoint
with the device path. With the volume name you can
do further tests to find your USB drives.


Uwe

 

[Bob I]

The drives are setup into 2 arrays of 6 drives each. The sx6000 card
controls everything, RAID-5, and 128MB Cache on the card. Can even hot
swap them and rebuild the array without having to take the server down.

Yes, that last is the real beauty of RAID-5 hardware!