Power supply question?

[Nosrema58]

I have a 300W athlon approved power supply and I am unsure on how many drives I can have safely. I already have a dvdrom, zip100, and two ata100 hdds. I am thinking of getting two more ata100's because I found out that I can't do hardware raid0 in windows and then setup software raid0 in linux using the same drives. So for me to still have a dual boot machine and use software raid0 in linux then I am going to need another pair of drives. I am worried that this would be too much for the 300W power supply. Does anyone have any advice?

 

[Jex]

I'm guessing you'll be ok. I've got a 300W PSU running 3 hdd's, dvdrom and cdrw. No problems.

 

[Nosrema58]

I think I should be ok because I will not be using more than 2 hdd's at a time. Because if I setup linux to run on a primary master hdd and a secondary master hdd, it will not be able to see the two other hdd's in the hardware raid0 array. Actually it will be able to see the first drive but it will report the wrong partition information. Then when I boot to windows, using the raid0 array, it will not be able to see the two linux drives unless I format a fat32 partition on one of the linux drives. And the zip and dvd shouldn't draw much power unless I am using them. So unless anyone has a previous bad experience with 6 ide devices using a 300w power supply I guess I will try it.

 

[tornadobox]

On my Antec 300w I have a DVD drive, CD-RW drive, Zip Drive, Floppy, 2 Hard Drives, 3 case fans, and CPU fan, along with my GeForce3 fan.

Not a single problem with power in this setup.

 

[heffe734]

no problem...unless you gonna oc later...that's gonna require 400 W +