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Is there a maximum amount of hard drives that one can connect to a 64-bit linux machine? I'm not concerned with practicality, as my situation involves a VM.

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Edited your question, since "mounts" are not quite the same thing as "hard drives". – Renan Mar 29 '12 at 18:50
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Another way to ask this is "Could I attach, say, 147 file systems to my Linux machine? In other words, tell us what you are trying to accomplish and we can give you more practical answers. Unless this is an intellectual exercise only. – uSlackr Mar 29 '12 at 21:45
This is an intellectual exercise only. – monksy Jan 25 at 23:09

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From this LinuxQuestions post:

Linux does not put arbitrary limits on the number of hard disks.

Also, from this post in the Debian mailing list:

That's easy. After /dev/sdz comes /dev/sdaa. And, I've just tested it by making and logging into 800 ISCSI targets on my laptop, after /dev/sdzz comes /dev/sdaaa. :)

and this blog post:

For SATA and SCSI drives under a modern Linux kernel, the same as above applies except that the code to derive names works properly beyond sdzzz up to (in theory) sd followed by 29 z‘s!

So, theoretically there are limits, but in practice they are unreachable.

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Surely there is a limit. – monksy Mar 29 '12 at 23:04
There is, but in practice it's almost unreachable. – Renan Mar 29 '12 at 23:29

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