At 06:56 AM 2/26/1998 Kylie Nielsen wrote:
>
>I am an IT student in Australia, and I have a few questions to research.
>I'm not sure if they belong here or in Vplanets, so I will send them to
>both. My questions are:
>1) Theoretically, how many HDD's can you put in a an ordinary IDE
>controlled computer?
>2) Theoretically, how many NIC's can you put in a mainframe?
>3) Can Novell Netware span more than one physical drive?
>Any help with these questions would be greatly appreciated.


Kylie:

As to question number one, consider:

A.  24 hard drive letters and you're out of hard drives.

B.  Usually, only 2 IDE drives per IRQ channel, Master
      and Slave drives -- and with the normal usage
      of IRQs (being the System Timer, Keyboard,
      Cascade, Com 1 and 2, Soundcard, Floppy, LPT1,
      RTC and Math Coprocessor) -- you would only have
      6 open IRQs, for a total of 12 IDE drives. Subtract
      one if you have one CD-ROM drive.

C.  Power Supply wattage is also a limitation; subtract
      current usage for every device except hard drives,
      then divide the remaining wattage by the power
      consumption of a single IDE hard drive to get maximum
      number of hard drives supported, power-wise.

I defer the Network questions to our Network collegues.

Is this a take-home quiz?   <g>

Regards,

John Chin