Hi guys, I would really like to know how many HDD i can connect to my Windows 10 ?
I have started plotting on windows now, and I’m a bit worry that I’m limited in the future… Should i change to Ubuntu ?
Any suggestions 
I think that Windows 10 allows “127” drives connected physically to 1 PC.
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I use windows, and max I could connect unfortunetly was 17, above that the system crashs.
Tried on AMD and Intel Mobo, on intel the max was 13 (using windows)
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Hmm okay, is it 127 or 17 then ? 
There is a big difference ?
It is definitely neither on your Windows computer. You CANNOT have 127 devices connected + hubs because the hubs count as a device and the USB XHCI counts as a device and the USB controller card or chip counts as a device. If you are looking for a definitive number stating “if you plug in x+1 USB devices, then USB will no longer function properly”, then you are out of luck. The 127 device limit is only a theoretical limit and in practice is never achieved (although some people on this forum tried to get close to it with issues).
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Okay, that was a bit more detailed answer.
I have currently 2 x USB hubs with 20 usb ports. (40 port in total)
My board is a Asus 570x with 6 USB 3.1 ports.
I just read in another post that it’s limited by the alphabet A-Z. So basically I’m limited…
I think it’s a good idea to switch to Ubuntu now 
I am not 100% sure here but I am confident in saying this. USB was designed with the 127 device including controller + hubs/root hubs/XHCI limit. If you switch to Ubuntu, you will have the same issue. If you got an Intel Mac (Mac Mini for example), you’d have a similar issue. If you got an M1 Mac Mini, Good luck as ARM has it’s own issues and comes nowhere near 127 devices. People are having this issue on a Raspberry Pi on Linux with a USB hub hat (USB hub that plugs into the GPIO header).
Nothing will get you a massive amount of USB devices. You are better off getting a USB drive bay (JBOD) with room for like 6 or 8 drives in it and that has circuitry to control the drives independently from the USB/computer. You should be able to add more than 1 of those till you hit the USB limit.
Okay well this it’s good 
I have read that in Ubuntu you could have unlimited USB connection through USB hubs… But that isn’t correct, then i would be waste of time switching from windows to Ubuntu…
Anyone else have a better idea 
?
Ubuntu will never have an unlimited amount of USB drives as you will hit hardware limits before you reach 127 devices on the USB bus.
It has been stated before that there is NO way to get around the 127 device limit. Some people tried getting close and failed. Reference this thread on the forum:
Someone tried 100+ USB drives and failed. Adding PCIe USB host cards didn’t solve it. Recommended solution on that thread was to get a server or NAS or storage box and just take all the drives out of the cases/shells/USB adapters and put them in the NAS or server or storage box instead.
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Okay, thanks alot.
I think i will keep adding drives until the limit in windows is reached and then have one of those NAS/Storage box by hand
Hi!
I think it depends on the motherboard chipset. I have an old PC with Win10 and Intel G3260 processor, it’s limit was 19 drives. After that number, an error popped up “Not enough USB controller resources”. So I ended up just using 16 x drives there with an Orico 16 port hub.
Another PC is more recent and has Athlon 220GE on MSI X470 Gaming Plus Max and currently has 39 drives on 4 x Orico 10 port hubs.
I think Windows 10 is not a good choice for this task and am installing Ubuntu already. My issue is that I quite often have warnings like “Looking up qualities on C:\SHARED\USB34\USB34…XXX.plot took: 12 seconds. This should be below 5 seconds to minimize risk of losing rewards.” Sometimes it takes up to 86 seconds! I’m not sure why it takes so long sometimes (there are no other programs running and no CPU spikes on the monitor), my guess is that Windows is not designed for this sort of number of USB drives.
Thanks!
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Just for others reference, I currently have 22 drives on my i7-9700k gaming rig. 21 of those drives are Chia mining drives. Gaming doesn’t seem to really affect the Chia mining.
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Omg, witch board are you using
There’s no such limit.
your right, its possible to share as a directory (and the limit of letters its D to Z, as A and B its floppy and C its… C lol)
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There’s no such limit either 
My B drive is a SSD.
There is a limit to the number of physically mapped and named drives in Windows. 26 drives is the limit. Windows will only advertise 24 drive letters (C-Z) because A & B are reserved for floppy. You can manually assign A & B if needed.
However, once you reach drive Z, then you would need to look at mapping drives as folders within a drive with a drive letter. You create your folder on one drive. Convention is to have the folders on 1 drive from what I see. Then in local disc management, where you assign a drive letter, you have the option to mount the drive as an empty NTFS folder (one of the empty folders you already created for this purpose).
This still doesn’t solve the USB drive limit though.
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From my understanding, you could benefit by switching to Ubuntu because the plotting is
~15-20% faster on Linux.
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I have tested that my computer can recognize up to 20 external USB 3.0 hard disks
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Nice, have you tested more than 20?