Antec Smartpower 400W - Enough for 7 hard drives in dual Athlon setup

[bigshooter]

I might be purchasing a dual Athlon setup and sticking it in an Antec rack mountable 4U case. I will be purchasing a 6channel SATA raid 5 controller for this. I'll have 6 200gig 7200rpm drives along with a dvd+-rw drive, a 40gig system drive, a dvd drive, cheap vid card, and possibly a wireless card. Should I be laright with the 400W smart power? I think I'll probably have to go 500W, but thought I'd ask first. A Dell poweredge I put together at work with 7 10k SCSI drives have a 4xx W ps, but Dell designs there stuff a little better than I do.

 

[Tiamat]

I have 4x HDD, 2x Optical, OCd 1800+ to 2.2ghz, Audigy Platinum EX, 120mm,92mm, 3x 80mm running off of a True Blue 480Watt with no problems. If i were in your shoes, I would have probably opted for the TruePower 550 by Antec just "to be sure." I have no clue if that is overkill, but then again, you are running dually athlon and half a dozen HDD. My guess, is that if you get a dependable PS like the antec true power, you *should* be fine, but dont take my word for it...

 

[Zepper]

Quite often dual CPU mobos require non-standard PSUs. If it were just the drives, there would be no problem, but a dual CPU setup (assuming they use the 12V rail to power the CPUs as they should) will put substantial load on the 12V rail - which is (of course) also used to run the drive motors. So study the specs and requirements of the mobo carefully before choosing the PSU. I would figure in a 20-30% power cushion so the PSU doesn't run too hot and is really loafing much of the time. Buying one of the better brands adds substantially to the comfort zone.
. The better dual CPU mobo mfrs will have a link on the specs page of each mobo with a list of PSUs recommended for use with it. I just looked on Tyan's site and there are quite a few to choose from with their dual AthMP boards - not so many for dual Opterons.
.bh.

 

[croak]

I think you're gonna be pushing it too tight. Figure the drives are around 2A each, that's 14A for the drives alone, and your Smartpower 400W does about what on the 12V, 18A?

I had a cheapo Turbolink 420W (CWT?) that couldn't support my dual p3 1ghz, 8 x WD 7200rpm drives, and a 10k segate scsi. Went with an Enermax 465W which advertises 33A on the 12V (which seem uber high) and it works fine. Got an Antec Tru480 coming, which advertises 20A or 22A on the 12V, I'll report back if that works fine.

The guys on the 2cpu.com forums might also be able to give guidance, seeing how they are all dually and highend and stuff

 

[beatle]

What are the drives? Hard drives use a combination of +5v and +12v, and it's nowhere near 2v, even for 15k SCSI drives on startup. WD's SATA 200GB drives pull .47A on the +12v rail and .8A on the +5v. Check sandpile.org for your specific CPUs to see how much they pull.

Dell doesn't make "magic" PSUs. Granted, they're designed for server duty, so they're generally heavier (this is good) and have stronger fans. I don't believe Smartpower PSUs have individual drive rails, so the 12v is likely by itself and the 3.3v and 5v rails are shared. Take a look at the duallie in my sig and you'll see that you may not need more than a 400w, depending on which MP cpus you're running.