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Strange HD/Power issues

I

ianbergman

Senior member
OK, I'm beginning to think I just maxed out my power supply w/out realizing it, but:

System--
350 Watt Antec power supply (do I just not have enough power?)
3 optical drives (2 CDRW, 1DVD)
5 IDE hard drives
everything else typical (geforce3, creative live card, etc)

this problem has been going on for a while, but I just lost a hard drive, to this, I presume, so I'm more motivated to fix this.

Problem--
Two or more of the hard drives will constantly sound like they're spinning up/down (high pitched, faint whine, etc) and computer will freeze intermittently. Usually I can get a while after boot before this happens, but not always. Comp loses access to the drives.

For a while, I thought it might just be loose power cabling, but it doesn't seem to be -- i taped the cables in with electrical tape. Same problem. Turning the computer off, re-seating the cables, seems to fix it, though, for anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours.

Do I need a bigger power supply? maybe just a new one? For now, I've disconnected all but my primary HD 'cause I'm afraid of losing more -- none of these problems seem to be happening now, with only one hard drive plugged in. And while I'm on the the topic, anyone know any good NTFS repair tools? CHKDSK tells me it doesn't have enough free space to recover the damaged drive.

Thanks!
 
You don't say what your processor is, which is important in it's self.
If your running a P4 or Athlon and above, they take 60 to 70 watts by themselves. The other factor is the quality of your power supply. It is probably a good bet that you are underpowered for that many drives.
 
It's an Athlon XP2100+ -- palamino.

So yeah, it's sucking up power. I had run the math and it seemed like I had plenty of spare power, but oh well, I guess it's time to track down a 450-watter and see if that fixes things...

edit: OK, just splurged on a 480W antec... if that's not enough power, i don't know what is.
 
how much power does a typical HD (7200rpm) take, by the way? I was assuming it peaked under 20 watts, based on what I could find on the manufacturer's websites...
 
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