number of hard drives that can be used with 450W PSU?

[happyhelper]

I have a dozen or more hard drives and just wondered how many "should" be able to run without power problems with a 450W PSU (12v rail has 18A) and a Asus nForce mobo w/onbaord LAN and audio, a few fans and 5900 nvidia video card?

No SATA drives, just IDE, using IDE, RAID and a ATA card to connect them.

Also, to connect about 8 or 10 (80-200GB) drives, what wattage PSU would be ideal, necessary or the least to do the job?

 

[tfinch2]

It all depends on the PSU brand and reliability. A 450W PSU with only 18A on the 12v rail is very weak. Hell my Seasonic has more than that and it's only 300W. I'd say you'd be pushing it with 3-4 drives at most. I think the rule of thumb is 30W per drive and all considering that 5900 is pretty power hungry.

 

[Zepper]

You would want to have at least 2 Amps for each drive at startup (and about 1A each while just running) or rig a way to start some drives with a delay. The spec sheets for your drives will give you exact numbers for startup current and running current, but you want to have a conservative cushion beyond actual need - thus my 2A per drive figure for startup.
. SCSI adapters include Stagger Start to handle the startup load issue. IDE doesn't. So the PSU you mention falls far short (unless you build in a delay). - actually it would be border line even then. Recently designed 450W PSUs can have over 25A (even over 30) of 12V and even that wouldn't be enough without including a delay scheme. Check out some of the XClio PSUs at Newegg for examples. I often recommend running dual PSUs in such situations.
. And remember that these days it is NOT ONLY the drives that use 12V - the CPU runs off it and even some high-end video cards. Be sure you figure in everything.

.bh.

Here, have a :beer: !

 

[happyhelper]

Thanks, both of you. I was just looking at newegg, and thought this one looked pretty good, http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProductDe...-148-008&catalog=23&manufactory=BROWSE

It seems like I should be able to at least have more drives going than I can now (4 work now).

 

[fstime]

Good day,

I have a TT 420 watt 18A PSU,

I run four hard drives with an A64/6800 system, 12V never goes under 11.80 under prime95 load, idle is 11.92-11.97 with a 12.07 high. Five case fans, 2 optical drives, floppy.

EDIT: For eight to ten hard drives, you would probably want somthing heavy duty, 600 watt OCZ powersteam would be my suggestion. You could easily get away with the 520 watt model though, stay away from the modstream byw.

 

[ribbon13]

$56 XClio 400BL
$59 XClio 450BL
$87 XClio 480BL < I got one of these for my GF's rig. Ripple is only 35mv! 12v is 11.92v. ^^

 

[Pariah]

At least 6, maybe more. If you have the ability to delay spinup on some of the drives, 8 should be doable. I ran 6 drives on a 300W awhile back for a few years without problem, though 2 of the drives were SCSI which allowed for delayed spinup. Running a whole lot of drives does not take much power, the problem is when your computer boots and all the drives try to spin up at once, that's where you'll ruin your power supply. I would not recommend running 8-10 drives in one system, regardless of how much wattage your PSU has, for a number of reasons unless you use a external drive enclosure that's designed with such usage in mind.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Pariah
I would not recommend running 8-10 drives in one system, regardless of how much wattage your PSU has, for a number of reasons unless you use a external drive enclosure that's designed with such usage in mind.

Hmm. I was planning on doing just that, eventually, using my full-tower Chieftec case (TD special for $30), and a 520W TTGI/SF/Topower PSU ($33 Directron special). Was hoping to eventually install at least 6, if not 8-10 HDs total. 52A on +5V, 20A on +12V, case has two removable HD cages that hold 3 HDs each, and each has a 80mm cooling fan mount. Would probably place remainder of HDs into mobile racks. With two opticals, that would leave four additional bays. This would require using the mobo's IDE ports (4 devices), plus two PCI IDE controller cards as well. (Probably a CMD/SI 0649 + 0680, since I have those lying around.)

Do you see any potential problem with doing that?

 

[Zepper]

I'd spring for the Sparkle 550 or the XClio 500 or 550 before I'd get the Aspire. I know the bucks are getting up there, but Fortron/Sparkle and Channel Well (who makes the XClio as well as most of the Antec line) are very reliable with reputations earned over considerable time. I wouldn't want less with that much data on line at once.

.bh.

Here, have a :beer: !

 

[Pariah]

It should work, I'm not disputing that it can be done, I just wouldn't recommend it speaking from experience. I managed to pack 11 drives into a midtower case, and if I had to do it again, I wouldn't. If the drives were all SCSI it might have been a bit better, but most of them are PATA which made cabling all the drives a complete nightmare. If the case had been a fulltower, it never would have worked since getting the drives properly mounted where you could get 2 drives on every cable would have been basically impossible. I used 2 lower powered PSU's that I had lying around, and that works OK, though obviously only one of them is properly mounted. Cooling was a serious problem since every drive bay is full, the air circulation isn't ideal and the inside of the case got really hot very quickly, so I just removed the side panels to aid circulation.

Again, you can have that many drives in one case, but I don't think it's worth the effort or hassles it causes. With 200GB drives going for about $100 now, there really shouldn't be a need to try and cram a dozen old 30GB HD's into a case.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Pariah
Again, you can have that many drives in one case, but I don't think it's worth the effort or hassles it causes. With 200GB drives going for about $100 now, there really shouldn't be a need to try and cram a dozen old 30GB HD's into a case.

Thanks for the opinion. I haven't really loaded a lot of stuff into this case yet, but others have suggested that it has excellent cooling, so I think that I'm alright in that dept. I agree, putting 11 HDs into a mid-tower though, esp. with two PSUs - wow, that is pushing it a bit. Btw, who said that these would be 30GB HDs rather than 300GB ones? Budget allowing, I want to have a 2TB home server by the end of the year, or maybe just 1TB for now, and then I'll go from there. One might question why.. but this is one of those, "why the heck not?" projects. I'm thinking, I'll rip all of my DVD movies and PSX games to the server's HD, and I'll have a complete array of games, ready to play in an instant on an emulator, without having to go digging through my collection.

Then again, is it worth the additional noise/power of all those drives, just for that? I don't know, I guess that's part of the experiment. Now if only DaemonTools could mount compressed disc image archive files directly, I would be all set.

 

[happyhelper]

wow, you guys wrote a lot for me to digest... I'm swaying more towards a higher-end 500-600w psu than the aspire I listed earlier, now, (because of what Zepper, and nearly everyone else recommended) and I'm definitely getting rid of this POS PSU I have right now. I didn't realize PSU's had so much more power today. The one I have came with a case I bought a couple months ago (which I bought because it was the only one I could find with ten drive bays that were all within reach of standard size IDE cables to the IDE slots on the mobo and ATA cards. The case also had a lot of good places to put fans, but apparently they just threw a crappy PSU in with the nice case, which I guess should not be surprising of Micro Center!

Like VirtualLarry, my goal is to have ~2TB storage server, but now thinking about it, I might be better off getting some external enclosures, or to just put together a cheap second PC from my scraps and put a few of the drives in there, instead. Right now this PC I am talking about has 800GB (well more like 750GB, I think they are actually 186GB each, instead of the claimed 200B) - I could put a similar number of drives in a cheaper case, with a cheaper, older mobo and vid card, with a decent power supply, without spending too much $$.

Also, thanks Zepper, for the link about the PoL. I've always seen that as a coercive form of conditioning lobbed onto the youth that is very authoritarian in nature, regardless of where it originated or which governments are doing it, and regardless of whether it promotes any particular religion or not. It does certainly promote the religion of worshipping the US government and it's subsidiaries, including it's schools (or as Carlin accurately called them, the government's youth indoctrination facilities), whether it promotes the religion of Christianity, or any form of monotheism, or not.

 

[Zepper]

PSUs don't have more power, 450W is still 450W, it's just that it is distributed more toward the 12V rail(s) for todays needs. In the past, more power was needed on the 5V rail. Be aware that the Amps available on the 12V rail(s) is still limited by what the other + rails are drawing - so no matter what the label says, the PSU may never be able to put out those numbers on the 12V rail(s) except under test conditions with the other rails barely driven at all. So you have to consider everything when specifying PSUs: What everything but the drives will need + what the drives will need in respect to the total capacity of the PSU + a margin for a safety cushion. That's why I recommend two PSUs when a bunch of drives are to be driven. Two smaller PSUs often cost a lot less than one big boy and almost all the 12V amps of one will be available for drives...

.bh.

 

[Zucarita9000]

You should be better off with a dedicated disk case with it's own power supply. Or, you could get a bunch of external FireWire enclosures and daisy-chain them. This way, with a single FireWire connection to your PC you get access to all the volumes.

Most FireWire enclosure support more than 60 devices in daisy-chain mode, so you should be fine.

This is a very good one.. I have the USB-only version, but still pretty good.

 

[nweaver]

Promise makes a nice PATA controller that holds 6 drives, and will run as raid 5 with a hotspare.


I run that, and have a 520 Antec PSU just fine. There is also a CD burner and an 80 gig HDD on the mobo controller. The controller works fine, but not in 2K3 server (some patch broke it, took me days to get it fixed....fix was Win2K Advanced server, lol)