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
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