Hi there, I have the plans for a server in the works which will have 10 S-ATA drives for storage plus two Raid1 drives for the system drive. My question is this: How should I power them? I've done some research and the drives I'm looking to use (Seagate Baracuda 500gig) draw approx 4amp power at spinup. The PSUs I've seen all seem to connect their 12volt lines to the same rail, so if I switch the machine on with all drives spinning up at the same time, the PSU will simply fail to take the load. Can anyone suggest either a PSU capable of supplying the required ampherage to each drive at spinup, or an alternative way of powering the drives? If there is no PSU that can supply it to all drives at once, I can put a switch in the power-lines to start them up in banks of 4 or 2 at a time if necessary utilitising the hotplug ability of S-ATA, so can anyone suggest a PSU which could take a staggared load like this? Many thanks for your help!
Any quality psu should be able to power them easily, especially if the rest of the hardware in the system isn't anything to shout home about. A corsair HX620 or the like should do the job just fine (I'm running 9 drives in addition to an 8800GTX, a hardware RAID controller and a heavily overclocked CPU and the Corsair is rock solid) Most RAID controllers support staggered spinup, but not PSUs
You can do multiple PSUs. So one can power the hardware and a few drives, then a second one will power the rest.
agree. the corsair 620 W would surely be a good choice.. or, a real server psu, but those are expensive as ****.
What raid card are you usin? Generally the better ones supporting a bunch of drives should support staggered spinup.
Create your own circuit with a controller that starts up each drive in short intervals? Sort of like a DIY staggered spin-up, I guess. Just a thought, not sure how you'd do it exactly. cpemma might be able to tell you how to do it, though.
I doubt the computer would appreciate that, you'd have to spin up all the drives then send the boot signal.
I'd only be worried about having enough connectors - any decent psu should be able to do it. Be careful of buying one with >1 12v rail though - all the molex and SATA will be on only one of the rails so check that the single one has enough, rather than just looking at the overall value.
Have a system Psu and a dedicated hard drive psu if you are that worried. Obviously you want them both to power up from the same switch.
Hi again. Thank you all for your suggestions! Unfortunatly the case I have dosen't have room to mount 2 PSUs so I'm probably going to go with a good quality PSU like the one Mister Tad suggested and if I have problems stagger the spinup in some way or other. Once again, Thanks!
I just purchased a Corsair HX620 PSU for my file server. Currently have 6 drives working, with another 4 to be added later.
Enough to make your eyes bleed Okay, it's actually a repository to store, well, *stuff*, and 3D animation files / video editing files / etc etc
Exactly! Doesn't anyone else think "do they actually have anything to go on these hdd's" whenever these threads involving obscene ammounts of storage crop up. Your always better off buying drives as you need them, prices are always going down... Fair enough though if you do have terabytes of porn
The probelm comes if you are trying to do it properly with RAID, you want to have identical disks and in a years time the model you had started with might not be available. Sure you can start with a four and then add another array, but you end up leaving redundant disks everywhere. Now on the other hand a Raid 5 (or 6) off 12 disks allows you quite a good amount of space and redundancy. However all this is a bithypothetical unless the OP tells us what card he's using.
True. Hopefully he's going to be setting up a RAID array (5 or 6), otherwise thats a lot of data to loose if your PSU goes on a kamikaze run Remember to buy atleast 1 or 2 spare disks for each array Artie BrandT!
