AE2 - Multiple ME Drives in one system? (1.7.10)

[icecorerulez]

Hey guys,
Im a complete noob in AE2 and im setting up my first ME system right now.
What i know so far: The items (liquids etc.) are stored on discs in the ME Drive.
What i want to know - is it possible to hook up more than one Drive at one system?
Ty for answers

(sry for my english, after years it isnt the best.)

 

[Bibble]

Simply put, yes.

There are limits to the number of devices you can have in a system (I think 8 without a controller, and then it's limited to the connections to the controller), but, as far as I can tell, all the devices can be interchangable, you could have 8 ME drives as a system, you just wouldn't be able to actually DO anything.

 

[icecorerulez]

Simply put, yes.

There are limits to the number of devices you can have in a system (I think 8 without a controller, and then it's limited to the connections to the controller), but, as far as I can tell, all the devices can be interchangable, you could have 8 ME drives as a system, you just wouldn't be able to actually DO anything.

Thanks! Everything else in AE2 is a bit more complicated (im still at the storage disks ), so i thought it wouldnt be that simple.

 

[Bibble]

Thanks! Everything else in AE2 is a bit more complicated (im still at the storage disks ), so i thought it wouldnt be that simple.

It's actually remarkably simple, and plug-and-play once you get your head around the concept, but that can be the tricky part.

As I said, the limitations are going to be the cables (normal, dense, etc.), which havle limits to how many devices they can connect to.

 

[GreenZombie]

For simple systems AE2 is actually simpler as you don't need a controller.
My starting system has a access panel, 4 drives (Each with 10? disks installed), a import bus connected to a TC hungry chest under a TC mirror (so I can send stuff home while exploring) leaving space for 2 additional devices.

 

[ChemE]

There are actually all sorts of cool and complicated ways you can get around the channel limits. A network without a controller can have 8 data channels and each ME drive block uses one data channel. You can make a subnet of 7 drives and one interface, stick 70 16k storage disks in it, dump everything you own into the interface and then connect your main system to it by placing a storage bus on the interface. The storage bus will use a single data channel on your main network but it will be able to see and pull from and send to the 70 disks. You can get power to the subnet by bringing a quartz fiber off the side of the storage bus and interface and connecting those with fluix cable. Power will flow but not data, so those 8 devices will not use channels on your main network.

The subnet on the left is using all 8 channels; 6 for the drives, 1 for the terminal, and 1 for the interface. The system on the right, let's call this the main system, is sending the subnet power but is only using 2 channels; one for the storage bus and one for the terminal.

Instead of drives, you could have 7 deep storage units each with a storage bus and one interface as a subnet and then connect and power that the same way. You could store billions of cobble, dirt, gravel, etc in the DSUs and tens of thousands of other less common items of up to 4,410 different types on the disks in the drives and that would only require 2 channels on the main network, one per subnet connected! Like this: (the third channel shown used is because of the terminal on the main system)

Just manually put the first item in each DSU and any new material entering the system of that same block ID will go to the DSUs first. Or you can turn the priority on the storage bus connected to the DSU's up higher than that on the drives. Then material will go to the DSUs first and the drives second. Put a trashcan with a storage bus on the main system and configure that storage bus for cobble, dirt, gravel, sand, etc but make its priority in between the DSUs and the drives. Then, if you actually fill a DSU with cobble instead of going to the drives, the extra cobble would be routed to the trashcan and voided leaving your drives to store more important items.

 

[rdemay91]

Here's one way to get a ton of drives into a single bank.

Each slice of 8 drives in the bank will route to its corresponding P2P tunnel on the bottom. Note I've separated them with cable anchors to avoid any funny business. Same with cable anchors on top of the dense cable to prevent a drive connection.

Since all the tunnels connect directly to the controller and are equal to a length 1 hop, the channels will never route sideways through the machines. The drives will act a bit weird until you get all the tunnels configured with your memory card. For every 32 drives, you'll need one P2P tunnel on the controller. So each controller tunnel is mapping to 4 drive tunnels.

I could extend the length of that bank up to 32 slices before maxing out the dense cable carrying all the tunnel channels, though I would need to reconfigured the controller so that the controller-facing tunnels aren't sharing channels with the dense cable, and to be able to fit more tunnels on the faces. Then I could pop a cable anchor on the end and start a new dense cable line and extend it further still. The only requirement is that every connected machine in a bank must eventually come back to the same controller. No subnetting halfway through. Now while I setup cabling for 2 banks in that image, they don't have to share a controller. I could put each bank on its own subnet, and connect that back to a central controller.

If you want to turn your controller into an aesthetic focal point, this is my favorite design:

The only caveat is the dense cables only have 24 channels left to play with.

if your wanting me drives for ae this works and is insanely done well