[Jeffrey]

Hi all-


The thread title says it all. Are HDs power hungry? Could someone help me spec a PS?


BTW, the proc. is a 1Ghz Duron, so there is a minimum of a high-quality 300W ps required for the system to operate.


Thanks!

 

[boykster]

Hi Jeffrey,


I've got a "storage server" (see the terabyte discussions) that houses 7 drives (6x80 gig and 1x4 gig boot) on a bp6 with 2 cpu's...


I'm running a 350W psu and haven't had any issues with power. I don't believe that the bp6-2cpu combo is much less power hungry as a duron, so I would guess that you'd be safe with 300-400w or so. I don't have solid numbers on power draw for HD's though..


Rich

 

[jkaiser]

HD power requirements will depend on how many drives are spinning at the same time (ie what RAID you are running).

 

[slau]

Hard drives aren't huge power guzzlers - Once spinning, it takes little power to keep them spinning. However, spin up takes a fair bit.


Looking at Seagate Barracudas Spec, it requires a maximum of about 35w to spinup, but at idle, it only requires 8w, and even seeking will draw a maximum 13w. (these are all average figures)


5400rpm drives will obviously require less power. I'd probably go for a 400w minimum for such a system . I guess you don't need it to be ultra silent.

 

[Jeffrey]

Thanks guys. I meant to say 1-80Gb and 4-160Gb. I will not be running RAID. I plan on running one 80Gb drive on the primary IDE, and the four 160 Gb drives on a maxtor ATA133 controller. Budget is a big concern. I have a nice 300Watt Antec PS. I wonder if it will be adequate.


The computer will be in a seperate room from my HTPC.


Any more comments or suggestions are apppreciated.

 

[boykster]

I would go ahead and try the 300W PSU...as slau noted, power requirements for HD's are at their highest at spin-up.....if the PSU isn't adequate, you'll know it pretty much immediately, as some/all/one drive won't come up and be recognized...


Cheers,


Rich

 

[Wykat]

@boykster


I'm also using a BP6. Are you using the build in HPT controller and any type of raid ? There has been a lot of talk about the unreliability of the build in HPT controller. Therefor my question.


thx,

Wykat

 

[safaa]

hi

i have 500w ps ., pc has. 4 hdisk on it. i`ll buy also drive selector +

another hd to have 2 OS on same machine.

safaa

 

[Keh]

The 'title' wattage of a PSU is not a guide to its capabilities; in the case of the K7S5A for example, there are "400W" PSUs that cannot support an average system which your Antec might. The 'title' wattage is solely up to the 'optimism' of the marketting department.


The PSU outputs power on three lines (rails), +3.3, +5.0 and +12.0. The amount of power available on each rail is dependant upon the power being drawn on the others, and it is not a straight-forward trade-off.


A certain amount of power is available only for the +12 rail. Unfortunately, many so-called 'high-power' PSUs claim this status by pumping this rail which is used to power motors. As Slau mentioned, the major power draw is in the acceleration of the platters; once spinning, the requirements drop dramatically.


The real item to regard is the combined output of the +3.3 and +5.0 rails (the TCO), as this is what powers the electronics. The question of which rail is used is somewhat up to the motherboard manufacturer, as is the efficiency of the board's voltage regulation.


A 'good' PSU will specify its TCO and the amperages available on the two rails as a min-max/max-min relationship.


A TCO of 160 should power a minimal system, 200 the average and 240 a large one.


To give a real-life example, I replaced an Enermax 465whatever (so many variants depending on fan control) with a Topower 350; both fail when I try to O/C my system to a FSB of 147.


In spite of the difference in 'titled' power, both have a TCO of 220W.

 

[boykster]

@Wykat,


I was using the built in hpt366 controller under linux and running 2 drive striping (software raid0)....I had one drive per channel, and I had some issues.


The second channel shares resources with one of the pci slots, so I couldn't get dma working properly on it until I moved the lan card from that slot (can't remember which).


I had some strange "data-loss" episodes, where the raid disk seemingly was intact and operting fine, but certain blocks of the raid were corrupted.

Physically, the drives passed a surface scan individually, but when they were configured for RAID, they showed lots of errors..


I gave up on the onboard controller, and bought a couple of Promise Ultra66 controllers (non-raid) from z-buy.com for $13 each and slapped them in the system. I then hung 5 drives off of the 2 controllers (one channel has 2 drives..) and built a software RAID5 array....I haven't had a single issue with data integrity since then. This is still all under linux (Redhat 7.1)


I would recommend staying away from the onboard controller...I never got it to work properly under win9x/2k, and even under linux it has given me issues.


Feel free to PM me if you have any specific ???'s.


Otherwise, I love my bp6...been running strong for years...and the 2cpu's make for a great linux software raid system...plenty of cpu cycles to deal with the raid side of things.


Cheers,


Rich