A mate of mine want’s to network his house and have a computer/server under the stairs with some large hard drives in with all music and dvds on for the other computers.  I know various programs that can rip a dvd to hard drive and then use a virtual dvd drive on the viewing computer.

Two questions:

1) What’s the greatest number of hard drives you can fit in a case?  I’m guessing three (if you want a dvd drive as well).

2) Would there be any advantage to using microsoft server (about which I know nothing) instead of just bog standard xp?

1) Depends on the case, the power supply and what kind of drives. In a tall tower case, you could probably fit half a dozen drives. How much storage does this guy want and how much does he want to spend on it? Don’t forget a backup!

2) Unless you’re doing anything fancy or using server-class equipment, XP is probably fine. If he’s running XP Home, getting server would require him to move to XP Pro.

You could run a basic server off of a XP Home system, depends on what you define as a server and such.

My basic Mid-Tower case holds 6 Hard Drives, currently using 5 and a DVD-+RW.

My older full tower case held up to 12 Hard Drives…

Erik

Ok cool.  I was just going on my old desktop as that had only two ide’s and so came up with four devices.  Didn’t know if you could get motherboards which could support more than that but I knew you guys would know all 8)

I don’t know how much he plans on storing or what not yet, going to sort that out soon, but thought I’d get the know how first but thought if you could get lots of hard drives in a case then it gives room for exapnsion etc

Can you guys post a link to a motherboard and/or case which could be used as my quick look around has just come up with standard 2 ide or sata ones… thanks in advance

[quote author=“Mighty Matt”]Ok cool.  I was just going on my old desktop as that had only two ide’s and so came up with four devices.  Didn’t know if you could get motherboards which could support more than that but I knew you guys would know all 8)

I don’t know how much he plans on storing or what not yet, going to sort that out soon, but thought I’d get the know how first but thought if you could get lots of hard drives in a case then it gives room for exapnsion etc

Can you guys post a link to a motherboard and/or case which could be used as my quick look around has just come up with standard 2 ide or sata ones… thanks in advance

You can buy one or more PCI IDE controllers, each will support 4 drives or add 2 IDE ports…Promise is a company that is well known for these devices.

Erik

ah so you just get a standard motherboard, put it in a big tower and add ides or satas by pci cards…. I get it now