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General Hardware Discussion Hard drives, CD, DVD Monitors, All hardware questions not better served by our other Topics |
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230W PSU enough for 4-5 drives After some hardcore problems i had the other week with my machine i decided to wipe the dust off my old pIII 800 and set it up as a backup server. using an Adaptec Raid card and setup raid 5. i've currently only got 2 SATA WD2000JB (or d cant remember) drives in there mirrored and an old ide for the OS. But if i plug in another 1 or 2 drives, will my 230W old PSU be able to deal with it? Im not running anything else in there, a really old video card, and im guessing the CPU wouldn't take up much power. i have intentions to put a dual layer DVD burner in there though. what do you guys think? I also bought an 800W ups to run both my systems off.
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A dvd writer as well is going to be pushing it as they use about 2A |
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The highest current draw is always at startup, when the drives are spinning up. As long as your PSU can handle a potential brief overload at this point, you should be ok. The SATA drives you currently have use about 0.53A (6.25W) on the 12V line when they're active. If you had five of those drives, you'd be looking at under 3A (36W) required from the 12V line. An 8x DVD writer such as the Pioneer DVR-A07XL requires 0.8A on the 12V line.
__________________ Any views, thoughts and opinions are entirely my own. They don't necessarily represent those of my employer (BlackBerry). |
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Some drives provide the option to 'delay start'. This is common in the SCSI world, I don't know if your SATA drives have this option or not. I've got my drives set to not even start unless the SCSI controller comes up. The SCSI controller BIOS then starts the drives 2 at a time at 6 second intervals in order to reduce the surge load on my PSU. |
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hmm im pretty sure i cant do that with my drives. ive got the box plugged into a ups and when i turn the machine on the load goes up 25%. being a 800W ups i guess that means its sitting on about 200W. if i just say to hell with it and plug everything in, could i actually cause damage to my hardware other than the power supply? because if its just the power supply that dies ill have to buy a new one anyway, and then i will have answered my question. hehe.
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The most likely failure mode would probably not cause damage, but it is possible. |
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![]() ![]() A good PSU would cut out when a rail is goi,g in overcurrent ! Just try it, you can do a step-by-step, with 1 then 2, then 3 drives ... ![]()
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You could do the calculations here, to double-check: http://www.jscustompcs.com/power_sup....php?cmd=INTEL ![]() ![]() ![]()
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For my A64 system it recomends a 268W PSU, which apart from a shuttle system, I know of no psu's with that low a power output that have a 12V rail that can handle a Newcastle and 6800 based system |
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