How many external hard drives can you have connected?

With the intent of making a really huge file server; suppose I have an unlimited supply of external USB hubs (w/ their own power source). How many external hard drives can i connect to a mac mini?

What if...
I had to guess, I'd say unlimited amount if you could plug a powered hub into another powered up.

I am curious, why a mini as a file server?

with the single firewire port on the back of the mac mini, you can connect up to 63 devices.

i wouldn't use USB.

Well since I will be upgrading to an iMac in a few weeks I have found a most useful purpose for my windoze pc. It will become a file server across my home network. I'm going to stuff a couple of 500gb internal drives in it and then share them. I will most likely partition one of them in half and try reformating it for mac. The rest of the space will be formatted fat32. Windoze should be able to handle that.

I was thinking of using a mini because it's very compact and nice looking. Also, i think it consumes relatively a lot less electricity than other computers. I could use a windows machine but they tend to come in larger form factors.

There are some external drives out there that let you daisy chain a bunch of them together via Firewire. So you could look into this as a way to save yourself the trouble of getting multiple USB hubs.

burnt1ce85 said:

With the intent of making a really huge file server; suppose I have an unlimited supply of external USB hubs (w/ their own power source). How many external hard drives can i connect to a mac mini?

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Did you ever do some real world testing on this? I'd be interested in the results. We have a customer who wants as much HD space as possible connected to their mini so we're trying to find the best way to do that for him.

verdejt said:

Well since I will be upgrading to an iMac in a few weeks I have found a most useful purpose for my windoze pc. It will become a file server across my home network. I'm going to stuff a couple of 500gb internal drives in it and then share them. I will most likely partition one of them in half and try reformating it for mac. The rest of the space will be formatted fat32. Windoze should be able to handle that.

Click to expand...

If you are using any Windows OS for that file server, format all the drives as NTFS, so that it will be more efficient and secure. Connecting to it via SMB or CIFS from your mac will not require that you use any OS-X specific file systems on the server. This will save you time and hassle, as well - you won't have to continually explain to others in the house "if you're on the mac, you have to save in THIS folder."