On 26 Feb 98 at 6:56, Kylie Nielsen wrote:

> 1) Theoretically, how many HDD's can you put in a an ordinary IDE
> controlled computer?

  Two per IDE/EIDE channel.  Now, how many channels can you have?

  Well, there are three limits:

1)  Slots.  I haven't seen any cards with more than two channels on
them, so if you have video on the motherboard, you might manage to
have 7 slots to install cards in, plus the channels built in on the
motherboard.  That gives 16 channels, or 32 drives total.

2)  IRQs.  There are 15 available for hardware, and I think you might
get away with using all but 4 of them (timer, keyboard, mouse and
floppy).  That leaves 11 channels, or 22 drives.

3)  I/O Addresses.  The last place I saw IDE/EIDE with selectable
base addresses, there were 6 addresses listed.  6 channels is enough
for 12 drives.

  As a practical matter, more than three channels is extremely rare.

> 2) Theoretically, how many NIC's can you put in a mainframe?

  One doesn't generally put anything that looks like a NIC into a
machine that one calls a mainframe.  One is more likely to connect
some sort of "communications controller" -- often as many as half a
dozen of them -- to the mainframe, and these in turn provide various
I/O connections.  These are medium-sized computers themselves; it's
possible that some will accept NICs in order to provide LAN
connectivity.

> 3) Can Novell Netware span more than one physical drive?

  A hardware RAID controller makes several small drives look like one
big one, transparently to any software on the machine -- that
includes the OS.  I don't know whether Netware can do something
similar in software -- NT can.

David G