ok, have a few psus to choose from, which has cap. of 10 devices to hook up

[dannybin1742]

i'm also gonna have a 12x cdrom, and 4 fans, all low speed, 2 120mm and 2 80mm

will a 550W antex or sparkle from new egg have enough juice?

ok so i'm thinking forton, sparkle, or enermax, which has the most 4 pin moltex connectors, like i said before i will eventually have 4 fans and mobo/cpu and 10 hds (4 of them being older UW scsi drives).

can anyone confirm how many 4pin connectors each of these 550-465W PSUs have?

 

[Zepper]

Yeah, the sparkle or fortron units with FSP in the model no. (their high end line) should be able to do it easily. Also consider rigging a dual with something like two of the Enlight 360W units - very good for the money (but the 300 and 420W Enlight (actually Sirtec/High Power) units don't seem to be built as well as the 360). Or get a dual voltage power supply for the drives from a electronics surplus place like bgmicro.com or halted.com
.bh.

 

[Rukkian]

Even the 420 or possibly 480 Antec TP should do it

 

[mechBgon]

I nominate Enermax for consideration because they tend to be very generous on their 12V rail (for all those motors), and they also tend to have a lot of 4-pin drive plugs. If it were me, I'd hedge my bets and get the 465-series (that's a lot of drives and data you've got riding on it, it's worth going a little overboard if it's just $25 more).

 

[dannybin1742]

forgot to bump

 

[zodder]

and they also tend to have a lot of 4-pin drive plugs.

That's the reason I DIDN'T get an Enermax. There are just too damn many plugs. They're everywhere!

 

[dannybin1742]

just got an enermax from somone off the fs/ft forum

 

[nsxdemon]

I've been using an Enermax E651P for the past couple of years and it runs fine. As mentioned earlier, its got lots of 4-pin molex plugs for all of your devices. Just for reference, here's what the baby's powering:
- 2.5GHz P4 on MSI NEO2-PLS
- 4x dvd-rw, 56x cd-rom
- 7 hdds (all 7200 rpms and 1 raptor 10k)
- 2 x 120mm fans, 3 violet neon lights
- GeForce4 TI4600 on AGP
- Highpoint 454 RAID5 on PCI
- 2-port USB 2.0 on PCI

I also had an Atlas 10K III scsi drive running off of 29160 scsi pci card, but i had to replace the whole scsi system with the sata after the Atlas died. But yea, no real stability issues as far as the power supply goes. As far as all the software stuff I experiment with, well, now THAT creates some instability occasionally.

BTW, what case are ya using to store 10 hdds?? I'm assuming it's not the Sonata case you've got in your sig since it only has 10 bays total...I'm asking cuz my own hard drive collection is growing

 

[dannybin1742]

see i just got one of those, and it can't seem to spin up more than 4 of my older UW scsi hds, and my raid card is acting all weird, it hangs when it initiializes, somtimes it hangs when it is checking all the channels, it will spin up the drives and just say "spinning up drives" and do nothing else

its really weird, and when i do get the damn thing booted, none of the drives are listed in the raid bios, i'm not sure what going on, i did notice that the xor prossor gets really f'ing hot, i think i might have to epoxy a small hsf to it like my blue orb cooler. the xor processor looke like a 386 chip with the ceramic top its an intel 960CA or somthing. i noticed the card has a auxilary power plug and it boots much faster with it plugged in.

 

[dannybin1742]

actually i got an enermax case from newegg, its really nice and huge

 

[dannybin1742]

finally got the array fired up, enermax 550W, duron 1.6, 786mb of ram, 6 UW-2 scsi drives in a raid 5 array- 2 drives on each channel, all bridged to 1 array.

cost to build array:

$20 for the HP card (with intel xor, a little dated but nice)
$15 for 128mb of cache (was hard to find on ebay)
$50 for 10 UW scsi drives all 9ms 7200rpm <---- only use 6 though, bought in 2 lots of 5

total = $85

its pretty zippy too

windows 2k formatted the array in 35sec!!!!!