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How many USB devices can I connect to a windows 2000, 2003 and 2008 server machine?

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  • What are you trying to accomplish?
    – tomjedrz
    Jun 16, 2009 at 20:18
  • at the same time? 0. ;-)
    – MathewC
    Jun 16, 2009 at 23:28

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Many. Practically unlimited if the devices have their own power, though it will depend on your controllers and hubs.

IIRC the USB standard allows 127 devices (with hubs counting as devices too) on each controller, directly or indirectly, but many motherboard chipsets effectively have more than one controller and you can add more via add-on cards.

Some cheap hubs will not cope well with that many devices connected through them though.

The other limit is devices without their own power: each port should deliver 2.5W (0.5A max at 5V). This can be mitigated using powered hubs or devices with their own power supply.

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  • You could try it out using that 49 usb hub (as soon as it's available): serverfault.com/questions/19670 :-)
    – splattne
    Jun 16, 2009 at 19:40
  • I'm guessing that that "hub" is actually 8 hubs (1 hup -> 7 hubs, each of the "sub hub"s -> 7 available ports) so 57devices if fully populated. So you could still theoretically hook two up to a standard controller. I'm thinking "USB controlled rocket launchers" (thinkgeek.com/geektoys/warfare/8a0f). Would you like a nice game of chess?
    – David Spillett
    Jun 17, 2009 at 0:34
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u can install USB switch/hub to u r server which have self power and it usb hub come in 24port 48port which i have use already i dont if any product there which has more port..

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If it is USB Drives, your going to run into mounting issues once your available drives hit Z:. Ones beyond that will not auto-mount and will require you to go through the computer management drive manager snap in to juggle the various USB devices (or un-map any network drive mappings).

The largest limiting factor will be power. From my experience, chaining powered hubs doesn't work very well, so your other limit would be the maximum hub slots you could purchase x the number of available usb ports on your server.

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  • It is possible to set modern Windows variants to mount USB disks, or partitions on them, as directories (unix-like) instead of (or as well as) drive letters. For instance one of mine always appears as "c:\usb\xfer1", another as "c:\usb\dads_stick", and my camera appears as "c:\usb\camera". Speaking of "unix-like", most modern OSs never had "drive letter" based limitations so this is a moot point in many cases.
    – David Spillett
    Jun 17, 2009 at 0:44
  • To late to edit the above comment I reemembered that the questions specifically states "Windows 2000+" so my "other OSs" bit is pointless. The mounting-partitions-on-USB-drives-as-directories thing did work as far back as Widows 2000 IIRC.
    – David Spillett
    Jun 17, 2009 at 0:47

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