Maximum amount of hard drives in 64-bit Linux?

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.

There is, in fact, a limit on the number of drives exposed by Linux's abstract SCSI subsystem, which includes SATA and USB drives. This is because device files are marked by major/minor device number pairs, and the scheme allocated for the SCSI subsystem has this implicit limit.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/devices.txt

The following major opcodes are allocated: 8, 65 through 71, and 128 through 135, resulting in a total of 16 allocated blocks. The minor opcode is limited to 256 possible values (range 0..255). Each disk gets 16 consecutive minor opcodes where the first represents the entire disk and the next 15 represent partitions.

let major = number of major allocated opcodes = 16
let minor = number of minor opcodes per major opcode = 256
let parts = number of minor opcodes per disk = 16
major * (minor / parts) = 16 * (256 / 16) = 256 possible drives

I've previously seen people write 128 as the limit. I believe Linux more recently 128..135, which would explain the discrepancy.

The naming scheme (/dev/sdbz7) is chosen by userland, not by the Linux kernel. In most cases these are managed by udev, eudev, or mdev (though in the past they were created manually). I don't know their naming schemes. Don't necessarily rely on all Linux-based systems naming devices the same way, as the system administrator can modify the device naming policies.