Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

How Many Drives?

A

aminadab

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 3, 2005
132
1
Portland, Oregon
I have two ssds in my PCIe slots and the drive that came with my MP. I'd like to get two more hard drives for music storage. Will this be ok? Or is there a limit to the amount of disks OSX can handle?
 
aminadab said:
I have two ssds in my PCIe slots and the drive that came with my MP. I'd like to get two more hard drives for music storage. Will this be ok? Or is there a limit to the amount of disks OSX can handle?
Click to expand...
No limit that you're likely to reach in your lifetime.
 
I think the maximum is a limitation of the overall file system, and it is in Exabytes (EiB).

For Mac OSX Lion-


It's 8 EiB max per file and 16 EiB Max volume size in HFS+ ...


It's 16 EiB max per file and 16 EiB Max volume size in ZFS ...
 
Comeagain? said:
What would be the theoretical limit?
Click to expand...
As far as connected devices, Firewire can support up to 63 devices on a bus. Thunderbolt can daisy-chain up to 6 devices. USB hubs reach a practical limit in that even if all the drives are AC powered on a USB hub, the bandwidth would slow things to a crawl after enough devices are connected. Then there are network drives. It's tough to say how many overall could be supported, but you'd encounter performance or physical limitations long before you'd reach any limit from Mac OS X.
 
The 6 device T/Bolt limit doesn't restrict you to one drive per device either...Pegasus, and other Thunderbolt enabled boxes can contain many drives.....R4 = 4X1TB drives counts as one device, daisy chain two and you have 8X1TB drives etc.


There is a company making boxes whose name escapes me, but it's in a thread here somewhere, with a full box capacity of 48TB....Daisy chain 6 of those and you have 288TB...:eek: OP: if you get to that level of storage I'm sure we'd like to know!:)
 
But there is no limit to what OS X can handle?

I was just "playing" in the Apple store. Promise makes 48tb drives, with Quad 8Gbit/s Fibre Channel ports. Starting at $28,999 USD.
 
Comeagain? said:
But there is no limit to what OS X can handle?

I was just "playing" in the Apple store. Promise makes 48tb drives, with Quad 8Gbit/s Fibre Channel ports. Starting at $28,999 USD.
Click to expand...

I'm waiting for the MP refresh....Although who knows when that will happen...If the iMac gets a sensible update on ML's release, I may add an R8 to the existing R4 setup...Since getting it, I have had little regard for space...Shooting a lot more RAW data, and of course slowly filling the Pegasus. 48TB, yep, sounds great but the price doesn't....Mind you, just checked the price on the R12 for fun...Seems the price isn't so bad if you look at it that way:
http://store.apple.com/us/product/H5187VC/A/Promise_Pegasus_R6_RAID_System
 
I just ran across this, which I found interesting:

Generally speaking, your computer usually stores one character as one byte (including spaces, apostrophies, etc). So, if you hand-write 50 characters per line on a 25-line sheet of paper, you will write about 1250 bytes worth of information. Broken down, that's about 1k worth of data.

Using the above assumption that 1kB = 1 sheet of paper, a MB is thus 2 reams (1000 sheets) of paper. As ream is about 2 inches thick, a MB thus is about a 2-inch high pile of US letter-size paper, if we're being compact and writing on both sides.

Taking that a bit further, a standard 4-drawer filing cabinet with 2-foot deep drawers can hold about 48 reams of paper, thus 1GB takes up about 21 filing cabinets. A standard 10 x 10 foot room can hold (with walking aisles) about 3 rows of 5 filing cabinets (twice that if double stacked), so a fully-stacked 10 x 10 room holds 30 filing cabinets. So, 1TB requires around 700 such rooms.

The former World Trade Center Towers (the largest private office buildings in terms of floor space) consisted of over 2 million square feet of usable floor space each. So, each tower would have been able to hold about 28.5TB of data on double-sided paper.
Click to expand...
So that 288TB would fill 10 such towers! I sure don't miss paper!
 
That picture would also imply movies in paper form. Just imagine everybody's movie collections as made of paper, i. e. flip-books.

That would make the help of another person necessary to watch a movie comfortably – might be a bit embarrassing depending on the movie content...
 
GGJstudios said:
I just ran across this, which I found interesting:


So that 288TB would fill 10 such towers! I sure don't miss paper!
Click to expand...

Astonishing isn't it? My printer gets used for Photo printing and also acts as a card reader since it reads just about every card on the market. The day's when I used to print invoices, manuals etc. are long gone...The thought of 21 filing cabinets fills me with horror to say the least! My filing system used to run to 3 large shelves each with 10 file boxes on them....Now I have just 3 of them for insurance policies and appliance documentation...Everything else is electronically stored. just adding up the amount of storage I have over the 3 Macs and including the R4..it runs in at 7 and a quarter TB (the 256 from the MBA) I remember the day when 20MB (yes folks MB) in the old 286 machines was standard....Wouldn't even get an OS to run on that now. Old DOS 3.1 on floppy.....Glad those days are behind us now, but It does illustrate just how match care was taken with data storage in those days. Dot Matrix printers clattering apace and giving endless headaches....Ahh nostalgia...:)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back