A couple of home networking questions

[Jim]

1) How many computers can I have in a peer to peer network at home? I seem
to remember that the number is either 5 or 10.

2) What's the maximum storage limit of Vista and do mapped drives count
against that limit?

Thanks,

Jim Handy

 

[Questor]

--->

1) How many computers can I have in a peer to peer network at home? I
seem to remember that the number is either 5 or 10.

2) What's the maximum storage limit of Vista and do mapped drives count
against that limit?

Thanks,

Jim Handy

1) Depending on whether or not you have XP Home, the number can be
either 5 or 10. XP Home restricts the connection number to 5, but Xp
Pro and Vista have 10 available.

2) Not known what you mean. Storage doesn't HAVE a limit.
Theoreticall, you could plug in sever Terabyte drives and still not hit
a "limit". If you mean RAM, then that is dependent on your specific
computer.

Questor

 

[Jack \(MVP-Networking\).]

Hi
The limit is a matter of the OS capacity with one drive. Vista can handle
the largest drives that are currently feasible to regular user, which is
1TB.
If (as an example) the computer has 6 SATA channels you can have 6 ITB
drives., you would have 6TB available, and you can add USB Drives and keep
going Up.
Mapping drives are running on another computer so they do not even count as
part of the computer that mapped too.
Think about the Internet it is like one Huge Drive mapped to your computer.

Jack (MS, MVP-Networking)

 

[GTS]

See inline.

1) How many computers can I have in a peer to peer network at home? I
seem to remember that the number is either 5 or 10.

That's not correct. Those are the numbers of allowable concurrent
connections to shares, not the number of computers. (Max concurrent
connections to a workstation- XP Home and Home Versions of Vista 5. XP Pro
and non-home versions of Vista 10.)
As far as I know there is no specific limit on the number of workstations
that can be connected in a peer network, although practical considerations
(involving Class B subnets and typical routers) would tend to limit it to
255.

2) What's the maximum storage limit of Vista and do mapped drives count
against that limit?

What do you mean by maximum storage limit?

 

[Patrick Keenan]

1) How many computers can I have in a peer to peer network at home? I
seem to remember that the number is either 5 or 10.

There aren't really a lot of strictly peer-to-peer home networks anymore.
Get a router for $50 and you an attach a couple of hundred systems,
depending on how you configure the router. By default, most will handle at
least 50, and taking that to 100 or more takes a minor adjustment.

As to concurrent connections to one given system, for XP Home it's 5, for XP
Pro it's 10, Vista has similar limits.

If you need to connect a lot of systems to one device, for example for file
storage, get a system with some sort of server OS and put the shared drive
there. Linux with Samba can work very well for this.

2) What's the maximum storage limit of Vista and do mapped drives count
against that limit?

Sorry, the question doesn't really make sense. There is however a limit of
26 drive letters, mapped or not. If you use other path names, that's
another story.

HTH
-pk