How many hard drives can I have in my computer?

[hmunster123]

I have a clicking external Seagate Goflex hard drive. I'd like to connect it as an internal sata to see if I can recover some of the data. I already have two pata internal hard drives on my computer. Can i hook up a third drive? If so what do I do after I connect the drive, have never used a sata in this computer? Thanks.

 

[Hawkeye22]

The number of drives is determined by the number of SATA/PATA ports on your motherboard. For PATA, it's usually two IDE channels with two devices per channel, thus four PATA devices. SATA ports are 1:1, so one port per drive.

If your motherboard only has PATA connectors, you will need a SATA/PATA converter to hook up that external drive internally.

 

[vbgtw]

From operating system perspective there are no limitation on how many drives you can attach.

In Windows you can have up to 26 drives mapped to a drive letter and some users are very close to this limit: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4652545/windows-what-happens-if-i-finish-drive-letters-they-are-26. Nowadays is really easy to reach this limit when you start attaching USB and Network drives to dedicated letters.
Although there are ways to map more drives if you want to. You can map logical drives or network drives to a folder.
For logical folders you need to use Logical Mount Points: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc938934.aspx
For network drives you need to use mklink command: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753194(WS.10).aspx

There are no drive letters in Linux/Unix though so you always map your logical or network drives to some path which becomes part of your file system.

 

[fzabkar]

@hmunster123, be aware that Seagate's 3TB/4TB external drives are configured with 4KB sector sizes. When you remove such a drive from its enclosure and connect to it via SATA, you will expose its native 512e sectoring and render your data inaccessible. In other words, you will have a 4Kn file system on a 512e physical drive.