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Secondary PSUs for video cards or hard drives.)

C

cheesehead

Lifer
Surplus industrial-class power supplies capable of 6A or more on the 12v AND -12v rails can be had for $15. (That's 6A continouous, folks - none of this "peak" crap). That's an impressive 186 watts on the 12v rails alone, and it also featurs 6A on the 5v rail, for 216 watts of coninous industrial-grade power.

http://www.herbach.com/Merchant2/mercha...uct_Code=TM02PWS4574&Category_Code=PWS

I'd say there's a 90% chance that a bit of work with an X-acto knife and a soldering iron will result in two seperate 12v rails of 6A each.

Another option for $10 is an Amperor PSU. It has only 4A on the 12v rail, but 8A on the 5v rail, making it capable of powering six of even the most monstrous hard drives without much trouble.

http://www.weirdstuff.com/cgi-bin/item/22133

Today, graphics cards suck up a huge amount of power, and hard drives are'nt exactly, trim, either. By using a supplementary power supply such as those above, a large amount of load is shifted off of the main PSU - for $25, you're adding 204 watts of true continuous power to your system, on seperate 12v rails, no less - the trick might be to get them to share a ground, but it's not impossible

Alternately, I'd bet that a second PSU could be wired to power the hard drives and video cards. Two 400w Fortron PSUs (roughly $30 each) could easily drive a high-end system; one PSU for the video cards, the other for the motherboard, processor, RAM, and whatnot.

Am I insane? Or would this actually work?
 
I had dual PSUs in my last system. One Seasonic S12 600w powering the motherboard, essential hds & fans, and the secondary PSU, a Seasonic M12 500w, powering all of the other cases fans, the other hard drives, and the cold cathodes. It's very possible, and very easy with a little wiring and soldering. Basically solder a switch to the green and black wires, and that is how you turn it on / off. Also, cases like the G70B have a dual PSU 24p adapter that will turn on both at the same time. One nice thing about the secondary PSU is that a lot of the wires are unused (8p, 4p, 24p, etc), so they can be modded with a few supplies to power even more fans and 12V / 5V items... 😀
 
Kind of related, how much power does a typical hard drive require? I'm looking at a few drive specs and it seems they typically need about 13w each (Seagate 7200.10 in particular, but I'm guessing it's about the same for most drives). Is this about right?
 
I bought one of those industrial style PSUs with 3.3, 12, and 5V outputs on it from bgmicro and when it got here, the date code showed it was over 20 years old - CAVEAT EMPTOR. Once an electrolytic cap is past 5 years (or 7 for the best ones) old (even just sitting on the shelf), it's just looking for the worst time to die. When it can do you the most damage.

...bh.
 
P5D,

HDDs require 1.5 to 2A of startup current on the +12 rail each and about 1A each when running normally. Very little 5V power is used.

.bh.
 
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