Finished populating all slots & drive bays on server with just 1 bay & 1 sata slot left on card, so bought a Lian Li RH 48 HD Caddy - nice, but they are hellishly difficult to get hold of over here.

Knowing that I still need to add storage & that it would have to be external, I added 2x 2 port USB brackets (had spare headers on mobo) & 2x 4 port USB PCI cards, bring my total to 20 USB ports (system recognised them ok).

Using the external Sumvision E-Sata/USB 2 bay enclosures (I like them & if answer to question is yes, will purchase more) I would like to have a total of 21 2 bay boxes, giving a total of 53 drives (10 internal + DVD-RW, 40 external via USB & 2 via E-sata). I understand the basics of USB & the Sumvision boxes have their own psu's.

Would the server cope with that amount of drives data transfer wise? I'm fairly sure that power wise, there would be no problem as together with the external psu's, the server has a 700w psu.

Have bought a further 5 Sumvision boxes, but no drives yet. Still worried about power as I've been told several times by different people that the server won't cope, due to the peak spin up of the drives.

I am not an electrician, but this dosen't make sense to me........how can the drive spin ups affect the server? They will all have their own external psu's. As far as I can see, the only affect on the server will be the usb/e-sata data connections.

Any advice would be much appreciated.



At the moment.......

If they have their own external power it won't affect the server so don't worry about it...

Thanks User312, that's the kind of answer I was hoping for - yes or no. On another forum, voltage, amperage, wattage etc etc, was brought into play which totally confused me. Had they all been running off the internal psu, I could probably agree with what was said.

As you can see from the photo above, I have 12 drives internally, cpu, 2x2gb ram, gpu & a 700w psu & pulling 134w at the moment. Will it be able to cope with 21 (but storage will show 42) usb/e-sata connections?

I've never personally tried hooking up that many drives at once so I can't say for sure - the most I've ever put in a system is 10 internal and 5 external (usb/scsi) drives (overheating was a bit of a problem...). I've also never tried to push usb/e-sata limitations on any of my systems so I can't answer that for you either. One thing to keep in mind is drive letter limitations with Windows - you may have to play with striped sets (or striping with parity if you like data protection ) to host that may drives.

Thanks User312. I don't have to worry about striping/mirroring. There is only 3 drive letters on WHS. C(O/S),D(Data), & E(DVD-RW). Every drive that is installed/attached is added to D for one large storage pool (Drive Emigrator).

However, to play safe, when I get the drives for the boxes, will add them one box at a time.

I forgot.....on the cooling side, I think there won't be any problems there as each box has it's own fan. Also, on the server, it has a 230mm, 3x 120mm & a 90mm cpu fan