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420W Power Supply enough for 7 HDs? (1 Viewer)

Patrick Sun

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I think when I'm done, I'll have 7 hard drives in my main PC, so the question is whether or not my 420W rated power supply is enough to run all those HDs.
 

Scott L

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Wow, if you don't mind me asking, how much storage space is that total and what do you use it for?

420w sounds like enough. I hear the best time to check is during startup, where all drives simultaneously have to turn on and do self-tests. If they don't get enough power you'll get some sort of error. You don't have a power hogging gaming card do you?
 

Patrick Sun

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Well, after I'm done installing all the drives:

2 IDE RAID (two 160GB HDs and Rocket Raid card)
1 IDE 200GB (Boot HD)
1 IDE 250GB
1 IDE 300GB (via ATA controller card)
2 SATA RAID (two 120GB HDs with onboard SATA RAID)

So that's about 1.3TB.

The RAIDs are RAID 0.

I also have a backup 200GB HD for my main boot HD that I ghost periodically in case my boot HD gets infected and bogged down. I choose this over Raid 1 because I wanted a clean backup, not 2 HDs infected and useless at the same time.

I don't game, so the HD space is mainly for capturing video via firewire in the AVI format using the HuffyUV codec, and then crunching them up into DVDs, or the Divx format for further compression.

I originally was booting off the SATA 120GB HD, but decided that it was too much of a pain to ghost SATA HDs (since it was hard to tell which was the source and which was the target easily, and I didn't want to screw that up!), so I picked up an extra 200GB HD over the Thanksgiving Black Friday sales ($50 at Fry's!), and ghosted my SATA HD to my 200GB (getting the extra disk space capacity), and then made another ghost backup with my other 200GB for safe-keeping.

Since I always pair off my main boot HDs (by buying 2 of the same capacity), I had two 120GB SATA HDs left over after the main HD switch out, and since I could use them with my MB's onboard SATA RAID controller, I re-purposed them. They will mainly serve as a temp storage space.
 

Chris

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Ok, well, each HDD is a piece, but it's hard to just say it as it is.. what else are you running? I mean, CPU, Video card, etc. extra devices?

There are several good charts to help you figure out power supply usage online ;)

420W for 7 HDDs could be OK for the right system, way under for the wrong one :)
 

Sai

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420w dont mean nothing if you have them in the wrong rail. Not all PSU are rating the same or the same quality. You can get a 500w PSU with the power in all the wrong place and it would be compairable to a really good 350w PSU with a good rail. The +12V rail is the most important rail followed by +5v than +3v

Personally that is overkill for backing your system, but thats just me. If you are worried about losing your data why dont you spend the extra money on getting a nice powerfull 500w PSU with strong +12v rail with atleast 25A Most cheap PSU that you will find will have a cheap 16A or something.

These are some good brand that you should look for.
Antec,Enermax,Fortron Source,OCZ, Sparkle Power, ZALMAN and some other ones.

I have a Thermaltake 550w silent PSU with 35A on the +12v rail. I got it for $65 shipped on newegg.
 

Jeff Jacobson

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What are you capturing from? If your source is already DV compressed (e.g., a MiniDV camera or Canopus ADVC-100-type device), you should just capture to a DV-AVI file. (WinDV is a good program for doing this.) Since the output from such devices is already DV compressed, there's no advantage to recompressing using HuffYUV, and you'll actually end up with a much larger AVI file.

(The reason I assumed your source was DV is that you said you're capturing via firewire. If there is a firewire device that can capture uncompressed video and audio and keep them in synch, I would be really interested in learning more about it.)
 

Patrick Sun

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I'm migrating LDs to DVDs (and I don't have access to a DV camera), thus the need for disk space, and it's not from a DV source. I use the Datavideo DAC-100 for the bridge between LD player (analog A/V) and PC (firewire). I'm using WinDV for the capture portion. Here's an old thread on that bit of fun.
 

Max Leung

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I'd make sure the PSU you have is a high-quality one. The nice thing about the overclocking enthusiast web sites is that some of them actually invest in expensive measuring equipment and PSU testers and will actually have graphs detailing performance under various loads.

With that many hard drives, the current load would be very high when you do a cold boot - I'd be paranoid about the PSU right now. :)

When I get home I should quote the power supply specs for the enclosures I have. I know the ADS Tech enclosure I have is rated at 30 Watts, but I don't know what the current is rated at.
 

Patrick Sun

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Well, my PS is probably average:

+3.3V 28A
+5V 40A
+12V 18A

So the 12V rail is my limiting factor when it comes to current output. At least good to know.
 

Mike Fassler

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Jan 17, 2004
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yeah it will be more than enough if its a quality PSU, ie.Antec,enermax etc. also keep in mind a high quality 350W psu would prolly be more than sufficient. I run a ton of stuff on my Antec 350 and my pc is overclocked and everything. there is a great article in this months maximum PC magazine about PSU's and they do test a ton of them and give you good opinions on them. Also take alooksie at tomshardware.com as they always do quite a few PSU stress tests.
 

Patrick Sun

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Well, since I was sleeted in this weekend, I decided to get everything hooked up, and for now, it appears that the power supply is up to the task of powering 6 HDs, after running for 2 days straight.

I got in my mobile racks that I use to install the HDs in the main 5.25" drive bays, and that cleared up some HD space for the internal 3.5" drive bays, and that gave me room to install a set of RAID 0 SATA HDs along with the existing RAID 0 PATA HDs. So I now have an empty internal HD slot, and a 5.25" drive bay for future expansion, which would most likely be that 7th HD that I have in an external USB HD caddy.
 

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