Hard Drives and Linux (snippet)

SATA or Serial Advanced Technology Attachment

Systems now with port multipliers, can easily be configured to have 16 drives through SATA. Older systems could only handle 4 through PATA (Parallel Advanced Technology Attachment).

SCSI or Small Computer Systems Interface

Depending on the SCSI hardware, you could have up to 31 hard drive devices connected at a time.

Pick 'n' Mix

While you can combine these in as many configurations as your hardware will allow, the Linux boot files from /boot/ works on only one of the first two hard drives. If Linux is installed on the second drive, you'll need other media recognised by the BIOS/UEFI to get access to it.

The caveat to this however is that Linux doesn't have to be installed to a local drive. There are options that allow it to be placed on SAN (Storage Area Network), DASD (Direct Access Storage Device), hardware RAID devices (Redundant Array of Independent Disk) and more.