Can you have too much memory or HDD space?

E

eaglewolf

New Member
This probably seems like a dumb question, but based on some very strong opinions I received regarding a system build I'm working on I thought I would ask the question on a computer board.

Is there reason why you would not want to use a specific amount of memory or hard drive space in a computer? Specifically, if you had 32GB of RAM and 12 TB of hard drives sitting around (in the form of four 3TB SATA III drives) and were only planning on building one computer, would you NOT put them in your computer?

This isn't a debate about whether one actually needs the amount of memory or hard drive space - only the end user can answer that - but rather if there is something out there that would lead you to not install the hardware.

In my case, I purchased a huge amount of memory while it was on sale, and have some rather large storage needs - not currently 12TB, but it is growing rapidly and I keep upgrading my HDD's to accommodate the bigger needs. The board I'm planning on using can recognize the memory and I'm using Win7 Pro 64 bit version. I've never seen a problem with the size of a hard drive in a computer build if the hardware and software support it.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

David
 
You may run into a problem if you were to run all 4 HDDs in a RAID0 setup (seen as one massive 12 TB drive) if you do not have an UEFI or EFI bios on your board. I think the non EFI is limited to 2TB per drive or partition or something like that. I am not sure about EFI, but it was put out there to take care of this problem.

As for RAM, there will be no problem with that much, especially since your running Pro. If you were running home premium you would be limited to 16GB including vRAM from the graphics card.
 
At this point I'm not sure about using RAID, as I like to have different types of data on different drives. Plus, putting 4 HDD's in a striped array seems like it would increase the probability of a hard drive failure by a factor of 4. Depending on how I set up the data, I might consider a mirror for more reliability in the computer itself. I also do external backups of the data.

Having had my laptop and external drive stolen from my home a few years back gave me a different perspective on backups - this took many of my digital photo files that I had no other copy of, including some of my favorites. I vowed to never make that mistake again.

I appreciate the feedback.

David
 
It is always interesting to me how we bring products to the market that no one can actually use! However, if there isn't a need for a different BIOS to support bigger hard drives, why would anyone develop it in the first place? Someone has to go first, I suppose. At least the board I'm looking at supports the larger drives.

I put the 3TB drive in my current computer (an HP I bought a few years ago) to transfer some files to it and it said it was all of 746GB. Fortunately Google found the fix for that, and after updating the Intel RST my computer saw the full drive. Yesterday I didn't have a clue what "Intel RST" meant!

David
 
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