Here is an example.



Or, look at this instead.

I used a 6-ch. PCI card that supports optical storage devices as well as hard disk drives from a South Korean vendor. The other optical drives are connected to USB 2.0 external port and NVidia CK8S Parallel PATA Controller which must be the NForce south bridge. For hard disk drives, I used the onboard Nforce PATA controller for OS/WinXP bootable, onboard Silicon Image 3114 4-ch. S-ATA controller, and a 3ware 8-ch. PCI card. The SATA controller has an array of four striped WD 2000JD drives and the PATA 3ware add-on card has two arrays of four striped WD 1600LB drives, thus offering 800GB SATA RAID 0, 640GB PATA RAID 0, and another 640GB PATA RAID 0 volumes for smoother file transfer and access both inside the system and across network and internet.

What kind of power supply units or PSU can provide enough power for this setup? I used one and only one Antec Tru550. The CPU runs at 1800MHz, 200MHz FSB and 9x multiplier, made of 130nm manufacturing process, with 512KB L2 cache. Windows XP Professional SP1 is not the most stable OS for this extensive configuration but it is the easiest for most.

For cabling, I used 8x Foxconn 60cm 66/100/133 PATA cables, 4x 80cm SATA cables, one ordinary PATA cable, and 7 80cm PATA cables. The optical drives in the Aralion PCI channels are all either Master or Slave. Since the card only has six connectors for twelve drives, it looks like this.

IDE 1 Master: ODD 01
IDE 1 Slave: ODD 02
IDE 2 Master: ODD 03
IDE 2 Slave: ODD 04
IDE 3 Master: ODD 05
IDE 3 Slave: ODD 06
IDE 4 Master: ODD 07
IDE 4 Slave: ODD 08
IDE 5 Master: ODD 09
IDE 5 Slave: ODD 10
IDE 6 Master: ODD 11
IDE 6 Slave: ODD 12

To make it easier for me what drive is connected exactly where and contains which disc, I added a sticker for simple labeling on each ODD front bezel. The label reads: Nov 2003 DVR-A05, 2004.04 SOHW-851S, 2004.04 SOHW-812S, 2004.06 SOHW-1213S, and so on. They are manufactered date, actually the year and month, and drive model name. Some drives such as Plextor PX-708A has both the vendor name and model name very clearly printed on the bezel.

I'll add more drives when some things more arrive today. Picture not available this time.

You're a nut!
Or should I say cdfreak?
And I thought OC-Freaks' PC was packed!
Where do all those drives fit???
Are they hanging from the ceiling?

I would have done it. I mean hang the drives from the ceiling if it were my house.

I don't know any "ordinary PC" case for 29 drives and lots of fans and heat sinks. How can I install a 30cm x 40cm fan in a PC case anyway?

I also added an IEEE 1394 device making it 30 P-ATA drives, 13 hard drives and 17 optical drives. I'm really impressed with this power supply.

I was asking this myself??

Can you show us (photo)?

Hi Kenshin,

gorgeous machine!

Is it possible to have the specifications of the 6-ch PCI card you are talking about?

Thanks in advance,

ET

just a quick and simple question:

Each drive is assigned a letter, but if you have more than 26 drives (including harddrives, floppies etc) what does windows call them?

@Namoh

No, I don't have a working camera right now.

@eltranquil

The card uses an Aralion controller. http://www.aralion.co.kr but I'm sure there are better makers for multi-channel P-ATA and S-ATA PCI cards.

@Ockingshay

I haven't faced that problem so far because I like to span and stripe drives. Even when I have 20 physical drives, I can make it appear as one drive using D: letter in a few minutes



OK, I tried to find out what happens. Nothing happened when I added more drives using Network drives and Daemon Tools v3.46. Windows says the drives are connected but it seems two drives cannot share one drive letter. It is the same as when you try to use a letter already occupied. Another example, when you have two PC systems and there are C: and D: hard disk drives in PC 1 and C: and D: and E: hard disk drives in PC 2, there will be only one C: drive, one D: drive, one E: drive in the new PC with all the hard disk drives in PC 1 and PC 2 connected at once. The other two drives will use F: and G: letters. Of course, that is so only when the letters from C to G are not already used by other devices.

Thanks a lot!

ET

with windows XP, you can use the command "mounvol" from a commant prompt to adjust where volumes are mounted. typing the command with no argmuents lists valid volumes and their current mount points. you can make a folder in your C: drive called "burners" and then mount as many drives as you like as individual folders within that one. however, i dont know how well that works when you are trying to burn a disc with one...! you can assign drive letters this way, as well.

example: if there is a volume mounted on E:\ named \\?\Volume{c06434c0-2a00-11d8-92fb-000c29ba7bc3}\ and you want to change it to H:\

mountvol E:\ /D
mountvol H:\ \\?\Volume{c06434c0-2a00-11d8-92fb-000c29ba7bc3}\

the mount points DO seem to be persistent across reboots. you cannot have a volume mounted to more than one point.

I've never gone there, but I think it should use AA, BB, etc.

Kenny, one of these days that PSU will make a very big BANG and let out a little puff of nasty smelling smoke. You can run multiple PSU's you know.
Have you ever tried repeadly opening and closing all the drawers at the same time?

Almost all at once, yes.

That's allowed in GUI as well. For instance, oen of the folder in C: contains all the RAID 0 volumes so that one folder can have more than 2TB or 3TB.

Hi Kenshin,

wow absolutely impressive configuration, really crazy :-) I'd really like to see how your working place looks like, so if you ever get a camera, take a picture and post it please.

cu,

Jackie

It's not a working place, but home living room. For professional purposes, I would rather have multiple DVD changers and racks for servers and DVD.

There are people who have more hardware than me for daily uses. Such as a few quad-Xeon systems with 4GB to 8GB RAM and 250GB x 12 SATA RAID 5 arrays all connected to dual 23-inch LCD display units and projectors. Consumer electronics and personal computer hardware products have become so inexpensive and ubiquitous that anyone with some competence (or money) can have all kinds of things concentrated in one place. Once IBM sold 486 PC for US$10,000. For the same, I can have more than 10 dual-Xeon 800MHz FSB systems with Hyper-Threading and EMT-64 now. All of those were for high-end workstations and servers only just a few years ago. 4-ch. IDE and 8-ch. IDE were also difficult for the ordinary consumers, but now they are becoming standard on motherboards that cost under US$100 per unit. Anyone who can earn US$1,000 a week can easily buy 10 16x DVD writers and 10 200GB HDD drives without having to worry too much about debt. What I'm saying is, if you like something and find it also useful, buy it. The money often goes to shareholders but also to R&D teams for better products in the future. I think it's all about philosophy and attitude towards technology products in the West. How much do people spend on clothes and housing? And on automobiles and food? And on medical care and missiles?

Hi Kenshin,

I agree with you except for one point: medical care should always be top priority, nothing is more important in my eyes. When it comes to military expenses, it may sound quite ironic that most of the technological benefits that you describe above may never have become available to the public without military research. Negvertheless however, I am strictly opposed to sepnding any money for technology which has only one purpose: to kill and hurt human beings. Make hardware, not war!

cu,

Jackie

The only thing that really made it possible for the medical care to advance is technological advance. Optical products are of great use to fix human bodies.

It's not only DARPA that spends a lot on developing new technologies, but also Samsung, Philips, HP, NIH, IBM, Microsoft, Intel spend billions to hundreds of billions each year on R&D. Do you know how much the United States spends on medical care each year? Most people don't save money when they are told to have surgery or dianosis from MD and health care agencies, but most people don't want to spend money on hi-tech things because they are unfamiliar at living ahead of the existing generation technologies. I'm not saying medical care is unimportant. I'll pay US$10,000,000 if it can make my wife walk even for one year before death.

The United States spends 8 billion dollars per year on medical care....

What do you mean? Even South Korea spends more than that.

christ i thought i had alot of drives connected..hows the bandwith for the usb2 drives? i never could get them to burn at high speed (ie 8x and above) firewire was ok.

Trying 8x DVD on USB channel is just to waste time, not save it, I think. Perhaps a native-USB 2.0 DVD writer can do even 12x and 16x but no company is making one.

You must have quite a few external's in that batch. You out of anyone may be interested in this ultra slim slot loading (slot like your car cd player) 4x super multi drive usb2/firewire (6pin firewire cable will self power this unit, no need for wall adapter)

Check it out here. This thing can fit in your cargo pants pocket.

Keep that collection going!

No, only one of them is externally connected using the USB 2.0 port and powered by an independent power supply source.

Why do you need 14 dvd writer and 2terrabytes of hdd space? Is taht for work?

Why not?