need a power supply for 13 hard drives

[Cr0nJ0b]

I'm on the hunt for a new PSU...sadly. My ultra x-finity 500W is not pulling it's weight. My storage server will have 13 total hard drives when it's all built up. The motherboard is a Tyan 5161 with a PCI-X SATA RAID controller. Video is on board and there are 3 LAN connections onboard as well. The problem I have found is that I can't start the system with all of the drive hooked up. My guess is that it draws too much on the boot-up. I believe each of the drives pulls about 2amps on spin-up, which is only 26A... I've tried moving the drives on different cables hoping to balance better, but no joy. THe only way things work is for me to wait to plug in the last set of 4 drives.

I have looked up delayed spin-up but none of my parts support that.

Any help is appreciated.

 

[heymrdj]

Your 12v rails are only 16A and 18A MAX, meaning at most you only have 34A of 12V. That's the ABSOLUTE most. So no, your PSU is not near gutsy enough for the job. For a system like that plus a decent proc look for at least 50A combined 12V rails power.

 

[mpilchfamily]

Actually the 12V rail rating has nothing to do with the amount of power availible to the combined 12V rails. Those amperage ratings are telling you at what point the rails will trip the PSU off so that they won't overload and damage things. You have to look at how much wattage is availible to the 12V rails, divide that by 12 and you have the total amperage the PSU offers to the 12V rails.

Now the OP has a couple of options here. You can get a 1KW PSU to run the whole system or you can just get another nice 500W PSU that can offer about 28A or better to the combined 12V rails. This PSu would be dedicated to the HDDs alone. You could even use a couple of old PSU you may have around to power the HDDs.

A adapter cable like this allows you to have bother PSUs connected to the motherboard so when you power on your system both units start at the same time.
http://www.frozencpu.com/produ...r_Cable.html?tl=g11c28

This item allows you to use more then 2 PSUs in the same system.
http://www.frozencpu.com/produ...-XSU-BL.html?tl=g11c28

Saicly you have to figure that each HDD will pull about 2A on the 12V rail on intitation of the drive. So all 13 HDDs will pull about 28A. So plan your PSU needs accordingly.

 

[VirtualLarry]

That makes me wonder about my plan for a storage server. Plan is to have 15 SATA RAID drives, and one boot drive, and of course a mobo and a C2D CPU. Was planning on using a SuperFlower 550W PSU, but that only has 22A on the 12V line I think. Do HDs really pull 2A on the 12V rail at startup? I didn't think it was so huge. But if that's true, it looks like my system will max out at 11HDs with that PSU.

Does anyone know of any good PSUs with 34A or more on the 12V rail (pref. single-rail), AND has 10 molex connectors?