How many HDD can win 7/8 see?

[davev8]

A friend of mine has a PC with over a dozen HDD in it, the mother bored is a gigabyte with a AMD 880 chipset and he use the on bored sata and some pci sata cards

For the last 2 years he has had problems with seeing all the drives with win 7 and lately with 8/8.1 ...
It was not to bad when he had 4 or 5 drives but has deteriorated as more drives are added over time ..apparently drives come and go... the drives i believe can be seen in the bios fine.. he has often think its a hardware problem until now when he run a live CD of Linux mint 9 i gave him some time ago and and it has no problems and he say he has founded drives he forgot he had
He is so amazed with this he just pop over for my copy of mint 16
So my question
A
is windows just crap and or nobbled so you have to spend to get windows server after so many drives
B
you have to change/set some bios setting after so many drives
C
Something else

 

[MadShadow]

Are they receiving enough electricity?
Is he using one cable for multiple drives?
Are they the same drives?

 

[davev8]

Are they receiving enough electricity?
Is he using one cable for multiple drives?
Are they the same drives?

no drives are a mixed bag from 750 MB to 2TB
did think PSU was a problem so was upgraded to a OCZ 850 w
last year no big graphics card just a ati 6570

 

[SavageCupcake]

Why on earth would he need that many drives?

 

[davev8]

Why on earth would he need that many drives?

he ran out of wall space to put more shelves up to put his DVD collection on
so put them on the PC

 

[MadShadow]

I honestly have no idea, but try and get him to bigger drives or introduce him to cloud storage.

 

[davev8]

I honestly have no idea, but try and get him to bigger drives or introduce him to cloud storage.

yes i think its on the cards to change the 4 oldest drives at 750 MB each

 

[MadShadow]

yes i think its on the cards to change the 4 oldest drives at 750 MB each

Yeah, it's not even worth having a drive that small... Get him to buy a couple of 2TB or 4TB drives.

 

[remember300]

Tbh the cost of drives now you may as well get a few 3tbs and be happy with it also with his dvds if he has them as an mp4 format, if his only watching them on tv, pc or tablets/phones then convert them to avi's.
mp4 dvd rips are from 2gb-4gb avi is pretty much 700mb so he can cram more on with out compromising too much quality.

 

[jamesriley94]

I'm actually interested to see what this looks like.

I take it the 750MB drives are IDE?

Any chance you can get some pictures for us?

 

[hmmblah]

Surely he meant 750GB? I'd like to see pics too.

 

[davev8]

my bad i mean 750 gig they are all sata

i am gessing nobody had this problem befor

 

[hmmblah]

Windows 7 can literally support thousands of drives at a time. You will run into a chipset/physical connection/physical space limitation long before a Windows limitation. I'd suggest updating chipset drivers in Windows and/or buying a proper controller.

Best case would be to get/build a home NAS and use that instead for storage.

Edit: What's the exact model of the motherboard? What is the BIOS revision?

 

[davev8]

SOLVED

its A windows 7 / 8 is nobbeled he tells me he has installed Windows Server 8
and it can see all drives .....as can linux

Windows 7 can literally support thousands of drives at a time. You will run into a chipset/physical connection/physical space limitation long before a Windows limitation. I'd suggest updating chipset drivers in Windows and/or buying a proper controller.

Best case would be to get/build a home NAS and use that instead for storage.

Edit: What's the exact model of the motherboard? What is the BIOS revision?

yes i did say to him do a bios up date i dont know if he did or not... it will have been my 1st port of call
I dont no the exact mobo

but as my post above all seems to be working now