300W PSU for 6 Drives?

[CoffeeFiend]

EDIT2: Up to 32GB... If you can set the BIOS to boot from SCSI your indeed better of buying an PCI SATA controller...

Actually, there's some BIOS patches available to get up to 137GB (128GiB). Like here.

Might be useful if one wants to use some older 60/80/120GB drives at some point, but it's still of limited utility - and still no LBA48 (not very surprising, I mean, this is a socket 7 board! Haven't had one for like 10 years). Hopefully the PCI card works, otherwise, one might still buy a 80GB drive for 53$ or such (better than nothing, and quite cheap)

I'd consider buying a larger drive and putting it inside another box anyways (if the sole intent is file sharing, or using virtualization if you wanted a linux box, which I doubt since it's got to be a very old/slow CPU), and save even more electricity.

[LLXX]

Linux doesn't use the BIOS so I doubt it has the capacity restriction (it uses direct disk access).

I would definitely upgrade that PSU so it will not be stressed as much; I recommend 400W.

[Subcodec]

I'm wondering if this is part of the reason my newest power supply stopped working. It was working just fine, but the other day when I went to turn it on, nothing nothing happened. I tried a spare power supply I had and it started right up. My system has 7 hard drives (4x320 + 3x200), an Opteron 170 (currently at stock 2.0Ghz), 2 GB DDR RAM, Geforce 6600GT, and in addition to the processer fan, I have 4 120mm fans in the case. All this was powered by a Antec 450 watt smartpower.

Should this system have a 500+ watt power supply? I have already looked at a few possibly replacements at Newegg.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16817371002

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16817153028

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16817341001

Any suggestions? I use this system mainly as my HTPC so I'd like to keep the noise level down as much as possible. (Believe it or not, even with all the hard drives and the fans, it isn't too loud.)

[Zxian]

@SubCodec - Real System Power Requirements

I'm not sure how the Opteron based system would stack up side by side with the P4 that SPCR uses, but as you can see there - they only manage to actually load the PSU to just over 200W. From what I can see, the SmartPower should have been able to handle that system without too much difficulty. I doubt that the Opteron system would draw 200W more than the P4...

@LLXX - How is that system stressing a 300W PSU? 300W is a lot of power, and there's no way on this earth that a K6-2 system would stress that PSU.

[CoffeeFiend]

Linux doesn't use the BIOS so I doubt it has the capacity restriction (it uses direct disk access).

That's what I thought, but wasn't certain enough to say for sure. As long as the HD is detected and the bootloader works I guess... (I hardly use linux at all, no use for it really)

But with one drive, why not just keep the 300w until it dies (then buy a newer one). It's not like it can't really handle a single drive (and the old socket 7 system surely doesn't use much power). A 250w PSU would already be overkill (just look at Zxian's specs and power usage on a newer system) Edit: Looks like Zxian was faster than me on that one...

Subcodec: Best thing you can do is move hard drives away. Spin up current is like 2 amps per HD, so for 7 HDs, that's like 14 amps, on top of everything your system uses (including fast CPU and video card) Just the HDs' 12v bus usage at spin up already takes that old PSU to the very limit of what the 12v bus can take (theorically).

From using a standard PSU calculator and your specs (chose 1 optical drive, a sound blaster, and an extra PCI card), setting 20 to 25% for capacitor aging, and with any surge compensation at all, you quickly reach 500w. Give yourself some margin for expansion or anything (not running all full load either), and you're quickly over that. Regardless of all this, all these drives put quite a load on any PSU when they spin up. With all these HDs, dual PSUs would be a very good thing (but I can't see that fit in any HTPC case), hence the idea to move HDs away (and just stream media over network like I do)

Edited January 13, 2007 by crahak

[gamehead200]

Linux doesn't use the BIOS so I doubt it has the capacity restriction (it uses direct disk access).

That's what I thought, but wasn't certain enough to say for sure. As long as the HD is detected and the bootloader works I guess... (I hardly use linux at all, no use for it really)

But with one drive, why not just keep the 300w until it dies (then buy a newer one). It's not like it can't really handle a single drive (and the old socket 7 system surely doesn't use much power). A 250w PSU would already be overkill (just look at Zxian's specs and power usage on a newer system) Edit: Looks like Zxian was faster than me on that one...

@ LLXX, you were absolutely right about Linux not having to use the BIOS. After connecting the new drive, my BIOS detected it, but couldn't determine the size. I went into the BIOS setup and chose to disable it from checking the Primary Slave disk, booted into Linux, and it detected it without a problem!

Filesystem			Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1			 9.1G  5.9G  2.8G  69% /
tmpfs				 122M	 0  122M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/hdb1			 230G   33M  218G   1% /files

@ crahak, I bought this PSU for $30 a while back when I first got the system. I'm sure it will last for a little longer.

Thanks for all of your help, guys!

[LLXX]

@LLXX - How is that system stressing a 300W PSU? 300W is a lot of power, and there's no way on this earth that a K6-2 system would stress that PSU.

Startup current for those hard drives are going to total quite a lot, especially for older drives with more "agressive" motors. This is also the reason why SCSI server drives normally have a switch to enable sequential spin-up. The newer drives have spinup currents (for the 12v rail) of approximately 2A, but some older ones may have much more than that (I have a 5.25" full-height unit that takes nearly 8A from the 12V rail to spin up)

Also, don't forget about the 5v and the fact that the PSU rating is for all the voltages combined.

[CoffeeFiend]

You missed the point. He has ONE hard drive now.