Maximum HDDs over SATA win7

[BigHair]

I've got 5 hard drives, an optical drive, and an M.2 SSD connected currently. I know the M.2 port disables 2 of my sata express ports on my motherboard, but that still leaves me 8 sata ports that should be active, so 2 unused ports.

My problem is that when I try to connect new hard drives to either of these two ports they aren't recognized in any way. I thought maybe these ports might just be disabled so I also tried an add-in PCI-E card and couldn't get a response over those 2 ports either.

Is there a maximum number of drives windows allows for? I have a windows based Mirrored array and a windows based parity array consuming my 1.5TB and 1TB paired drives respectively and a single 4TB drive operating standalone.

**EDIT: I should mention I am attempting to hotswap. However even after reboot there is no detection of additional drives. Additional drives have been tested over USB adapter with success.

 

[IInuyasha74]

Perhaps the drives are dead. To my knowledge the only limit I can think of is the number of letters in the alphabet, Minus A and B, which I think are still locked down not sure.

I know for a time I was running with 4 HDDs, 2 SSDs, a DVD-ROM, and a Blu-Ray ROM. So I had a total of 8, while you are currently at a total of 7.

Could be driver issue, power issue, or an issue with the drives themselves.

P.S. If you continue adding drives you might find getting an Internal USB header helpful. I had several unused headers so I got a cheap adapter for like $3 that gave me two internal USB 2.0, which I then used a USB-to-SATA adapter on and ran both of my optical disk drives off of it since they don't need higher bandwidth anyways. Worked perfectly, if you decide you would like extra ports.

 

[BigHair]

Perhaps the drives are dead. To my knowledge the only limit I can think of is the number of letters in the alphabet, Minus A and B, which I think are still locked down not sure.

I know for a time I was running with 4 HDDs, 2 SSDs, a DVD-ROM, and a Blu-Ray ROM. So I had a total of 8, while you are currently at a total of 7.

Could be driver issue, power issue, or an issue with the drives themselves.

P.S. If you continue adding drives you might find getting an Internal USB header helpful. I had several unused headers so I got a cheap adapter for like $3 that gave me two internal USB 2.0, which I then used a USB-to-SATA adapter on and ran both of my optical disk drives off of it since they don't need higher bandwidth anyways. Worked perfectly, if you decide you would like extra ports.

As mentioned I have tested the drives with success so they aren't bad. I've got all my drivers installed, and this is actually a problem I've experienced on other high-end desktops that I utilize as manual backup servers/stations in the past. After so many drives it becomes more and more difficult to detect new ones. I don't think it is a power problem since this computer should have some 400W to spare before powering any drives (1000W total).