Installing 2 usb 2.0 pci cards in 1 machine. Is it possible?

[jsharris]

i am trying to install 2 cards into one windows 2000 machine. i am doing this for connecting multiple harddrives(7 for backup). whenever i install the first one it is fine but when i install the second it tries to install it as a real time clock. I try to point it to the right driver but it wont pick it up. is it possible to have 2 on one machine? what would i need to do if it is possible to make it work?

 

[SNGX1275]

I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be possible.

Are you going to be using them in a RAID fashion or something? Why wouldn't an external hub work?

 

[jsharris]

well i already have the card so thats why i wanted to try first and then if its not possible i would go get a 2.0 hub. i am using them for a monday thru friday backup. one drive for each day. then a larger terabyte drive for storing monthly backups.

 

[SNGX1275]

I'm sure its possible. Could be an IRQ conflict of some sort. Did you try switching PCI slots, is that even possible (free slots to move to)?

 

[jsharris]

you are a genious man. i tried another slot and it worked fine. thanks for the help

how many usb drives can windows 2000 have connected and turned on at a time? i am only getting 4 right now to show up in disk manager.

 

[SNGX1275]

There shouldn't be any practical limit. 128 is USB limit I think, but I'm not sure if you could go that high in Windows, I don't know what happens when you exhaust A-Z for drive letters.

Do drive work on both cards just not after 4 of them are up?

 

[jsharris]

well i have them working on both cards at the same time but it is not letting me connect more than 6 at a time. i plug in a 7th one it acts like it isnt installed. also if the pc is already booted up and i connect more then 2 drives at a time it tells me that it needs to restart before it can see the other drive. is there a way to bypass that?

 

[Justin]

Windows isn't capable of using more than 24 drives by default, because it has no way of mounting drives without an available drive letter, which starts at C:. When you start getting into slightly more advanced areas, NTFS has the ability to mount drives arbitrarily to folders on an existing driver, similar to Linux.

You're likely dealing with resource conflicts. Remember that even USB devices need to grab the CPUs attention. All new systems support ACPI and supposedly remove the IRQ limit, but in practicality it's still an issue. Also remember, unless you are powering these drives externally, you're putting an awful lot of stress on your PCI bus.

 

[jsharris]

They are all Externally Powered Hard Drives. It turns out that if there are 8 drives plugged in only 7 get a drive letter and if there are 7 drives only 6 get a drive letter. this is true until i only have 3 drives plugged in then it will see all of them with a drive letter. what ever the last drive is, that is the one that does not get recognized. Would an os upgrade fix this problem? What steps could i take to try and solve this issue.