A new hard disc is a good investment if you fear losing access to crucial work and entertainment should your PC become insufficiently spaced. Suppose the second disc runs out of room; what is then? Should you get a third? Let us read “How Many Hard Drives Can A PC Have?”
How Many Hard Drives Can A PC Have?
How Many Hard Drives Can A PC Have? Here is how you find out:
- Open a computer casing and look at the hard Drives
- The chassis of a computer is a window into the machine’s inner workings.
- There are various ways to determine how many hard drives your computer can support.
- These checks revolve around the motherboard’s available SATA ports since that limits how many hard drives may be mounted.
Examination Of The Model
Checking the type of your computer’s motherboard is the quickest and easy method to determine the maximum number of hard drives that a personal computer can support. It is also more efficient since it eliminates the need to turn the machine off and open the case. Most manufacturers, including motherboard manufacturers, provide a list of product specs on their websites for all of their products.
To determine the model of your motherboard, click the Windows key plus the R key, then enter msinfo32 into the search box and hit the Enter key. It will open the System Information menu, allowing you to verify the model of your motherboard next to the Baseboard Manufacturing, Product, and Version fields.
You may now look for the motherboard’s specs using Google Chrome since you now know the model of the motherboard. When you have the specs in hand, the next step is determining how many SATA ports are built into your motherboard. Counting the number of available SATA ports is another detail that can be checked by seeing an image of the motherboard online.
The Examination Of Motherboard:
To examine the motherboard’s characteristics, you may need to open your PC case, which may be difficult if you bought a prebuilt computer or for another reason. By opening your computer’s casing and physically searching for the SATA ports, you can determine the total number of expansion slots available on your motherboard.
- The L-shaped places that make up SATA ports are located next to one another on your motherboard.
- If you don’t feel like opening the PC chassis, you may check the BIOS to see how many hard drives it can accommodate.
- After being switched on, your computer will not function until the operating system has been successfully booted from the BIOS, an internal software.
- In addition, it contains all of the information on the hardware connected to your personal computer, such as the hard disc drives.
- Restarting the computer will allow you to verify the number of hard discs on your computer using the BIOS.
- You will have the hotkey to enter your laptop’s BIOS before the machine begins booting up.
- This shortcut key may configure differently depending on your computer’s manufacturer.
- Press it, and your computer’s BIOS configuration will be in front of you.
There are various methods for counting the number of available SATA ports, and you may use any of them independent of the details of your computer’s interface. Before leaving the BIOS, double-check that the settings haven’t been changed in any manner since doing so might cause unexpected problems.
What Determines the Maximum Number Of Hard Disk Drives You Can Own?
Utilization Of A Hard Drive
Even though you now know how to determine the maximum number of hard discs your computer can accommodate, additional checks should be made before adding a new drive.
Motherboard
The most crucial factor when adding additional hard drives to your personal computer is the number of accessible slots on your motherboard. The vast majority of motherboards are equipped with between four and six SATA slots, indicating that your personal computer can accommodate four and six hard disc drives (HDDs), excluding any external HDDs.
Modern motherboards provide a Serial ATA (SATA) connection for attaching hard drives. Seagate, on the other hand, is working on producing NVMe-based HDDs that can be installed on a motherboard without the need for SATA ports, albeit they are still in the development stages. In addition, some extremely old motherboards have PATA ports; however, given that this technology is now deemed antiquated, the presence of a PATA port on a modern motherboard is quite improbable.
You’ll be limited to installing as many hard drives as your motherboard supports, and they’ll have to be similar. Therefore, before installing additional hard discs to your computer, you should ensure that your motherboard is in good working order.
If your motherboard’s expansion ports are already in use, you won’t be able to add another hard drive since there won’t be enough room. In this scenario, you can either create a backup of your data and upgrade the hard discs already installed on your personal computer or purchase a new motherboard with additional slots that can be useful to install a new hard drive. The installation of an external drive is a third possibility, which we will discuss in more detail later in this section. However, the likelihood of these events occurring in real life is relatively low since people often do not place a hard drive in each available slot on their computers.
PSU
An additional hard drive must be satisfied before it can be installed on a computer. Current hard drives use less than 10 W of energy from your PSU. You ought to know about it. The low power consumption of hard drives means your PSU should be able to support other campaigns.
On the other hand, if the overall power needs of your PC are already close to the power your PSU is capable of managing, it is best to avoid burdening it with further improvements. You may have trouble with cable management if the power supply unit (PSU) and hard drive don’t have the necessary power connections.
Case
Your computer can accommodate an additional hard disc, even if no more space is open. Typically, four hard drives may be housed in an ATX box. Regarding case space issues, blame micro ITX configurations.
Unfortunately, some customers do not leave enough space between their hard drives and stack them on top of one another. Vibration caused by the hard drives might interfere with each other’s operation if there is no space between them. If there isn’t enough room within your computer’s casing, and you don’t want to install another hard drive, there is another option.
Conclusion
Let us know “How Many Hard Drives Can A PC Have?”, The number of hard discs a computer can support was the topic of this article. The most important thing to remember is that the number of hard drives you may install on your computer is limited to the count of SATA ports within reach on the motherboard. This post will go through several methods available for determining how several SATA ports are accessible on your personal computer.
FAQs:
Are there other factors that influence storage space?
We also discussed the many factors influencing the storage space available on your computer’s hard discs. When archiving your files, you have several alternatives, including the cloud, external drives, Flash drives, and other comparable media.
Are there other Methods of Storage Available?
The following is a list of different storage techniques; using them might assist you in circumventing the maximum storage capacity on your computer.
What are the other options?
- Options other than HDDs
- HDD Substitutes: Portable External HDD
- External HDD/SSD
My computer’s chassis is too small, what should I do?
If your computer’s chassis is too small to house additional hard drives or if your motherboard does not have any expansion connectors, you can still increase the storage capacity of your computer by purchasing a portable external hard drive or solid-state drive. It will allow you to access your data from any location. When it is linked to a computer through a USB 3.0 cable, the speed of an external hard drive is almost identical to that of a conventional hard disc. Because of this, it is an attractive option that should be considered.
When you have more than one computer, the portability and simplicity of connecting an external hard drive to a computer via USB make an external hard drive a helpful accessory. Additionally, they operate more quickly than standard USB drives.
Should I be keeping files in the “Cloud.”?
If the hard disc space on your computer is becoming low, you may want to see if cloud storage is an alternative. If you install a game but don’t have enough space on your hard drive, you could free up some space by moving your data or work files to a cloud storage service such as Cloud or Onedrive. It would allow you to install the game even though you wouldn’t have enough space otherwise. Cloud storage gives you enough space to back up your data and save items you don’t look at very often.
Should I use a Flash Drive USB (USB)?
You can take your data onto a USB flash drive to save valuable hard disc space. Read and write speeds of flash drives are often much higher than those of hard disc drives. You may store information on them and quickly move it between computers since they are portable and reliable. Here we learned ‘How Many Hard Drives Can A PC Have?’.
