I was just curious, but would the Antec TruePower 550W PSU be sufficient to handle 12 hdd's, a server mobo (of to decide yet), maybe a couple of SATA RAID controllers, a simple CD-Rom drive, and a small-time Graphics Card (Maybe 9600)?
A SATA drive draws a max of 12.5W, and idles at 7W (according to Seagate). A 9600 will takes less than 30W. Anyways...a TruePower 550 should do fine I'd think.
Yeah, the TruePower 550 should handle almost anything, it has a 530W peak output. Interestingly enough, I saw this quote in a review of the TrueControl 550 (almost identical PSU)... There you have it.
Well that doesn't mean it actually POWERED 12 hard drives. Also, be warned that a lot of server mobos use non-standard power connections (24pin or 8pin or both, even possibly aux). You should be OK though. You'll just end up spending a small fortune in SATA power adaptors and data cables. Not to mention hard drives
Wow, that's quite interesting with the 12 hdd's quote. Yeah, I can get parts like hdd's for less than wholesale, considering my buddy is a dealer of computer components. I'll be getting the hdd's for less than $80 us (Western Digital Cavier 7200rpm 200gig hdd's).
The Truepower series of PSUs are well known to have relatively weak 12V rails (the tru550 is only specified for about 280W) Hard drives, particuarly high performance drives, can take a significant 12V draw (up to 20W each during spin-up). Similarly, modern CPUs place a massive load on the 12V line (90-100W for a fast P4 or Xeon processor). If you are going for dual Xeons, then your PSU will probably not be good enough. You may be better off choosing a PSU with more 12V capabilities - something like enermax (but even then, there may be problems as they have 2 seperate 12V rails - with 1 for CPU, and 1 for drives; the drive one may not be strong enough for 12 drives, with plenty of slack left on the other).
That's not good news. So, since I won't be purchasing the mobo and hdd's for a while yet, do you think there is a PSU out there that can handle all of what is stated, no matter what? And if so, where can I find such PSU?
Well, it depends on what type of CPU(s) you will be using, and how you can deal with the start-up power surge the drives have. The first thing you need to work out is whether you can delay the drives spinning-up when you power on - 12 drives starting up simultaneously would be a very significant drain. I know with SCSI you can stagger the spin up (first drive starts up immediately, 2nd waits 5 secs, 3rd waits 10 secs, etc.) precisely for this reason. I've never used SATA, but I would think there's an option where you can do something similar. Even if you could arrange for half of them to wait 5 seconds, that would probably be good enough. Your limitation is going to be the 12V line (rated at 24A) on this PSU. Drive start-up is about 2 A Drive operation is about 0.75 A Clearly, 12 drives starting simultaneously will max out this PSU leaving no power for the CPU. If you can get half the drives to wait 5 seconds, then you reduce the max drive current to 16.5A The remaining 7.5A would be sufficient for a moderately powered CPU (Non-prescott P4, opteron). Booting a more powerful CPU would be relying on the PSU to cope with a significant overload. If you can get the drives to spin-up one-by-one, then you reduce max current to 10.25A. You'd have enough spare capacity for any single CPU. Duals would be cutting it fine, but you could probably squeeze a dual opteron in. Edit: Just checked out some PSUs. Looks like the enermax Noisetaker "701" 600W should take some of brainwork out of this. It gives you 20A of 12V dedicated for the drives. You still need to do something about managing the power-on surge, but if you can dampen this in some way, then you'll have no problems putting any mobo/CPU combo in. You get an extra bonus with this PSU - high-power efficiency. The antec produces considerably more heat, and takes significantly more power from the mains. I estimate savings of between $3 and $8 per month if you run that rig 24/7.
Well, I'm kind of nervous when it comes to wiring PSU's, so how would a guy like myself go about making the hdd's boot up at seperate times? Capacitors?, or should I just setup a dual psu setup?
I don't know - you need to read the manual for the drives and for your motherboard (or SATA cards). SCSI drives have jumpers for it. I've had some IDE ones that do it. Maybe there's a jumper on the drives that gives the controller control over the spin-up, in which case it's check the manual for the controller cards. Edit: I've checked for you. The WD caviar looks like it will support this (you need to jumper it appropriately). Pretty much all server RAID cards have an option in their BIOS to stagger the spin-up.
2A is a bit of an over estimate. WD drives draw 1.5A on startup peak (so for only a few ms) and Hitachi drives being juice hogs eat 1.8A so lets say 12x1.7 is 20.4A which is fine. However in the BIOS you can stagger hdd spin ups if you are concerned.
Ahh, that sounds more reasonable. That way, I won't have to purchase a new psu for this small project. Thanks a bunch.
Zippy Power Supplies REMARKS: * NEITHER +5V & + 3.3V NOR +3.3V & 12V SHOULD EXCEED 48 A * TOTAL MAXIMUM OUTPUT OF 5V, 3.3V AND 12V : 378W thats each PSU and theres 2 so 400Watt psu x2 that totals a max output of 378 = 756 watts this should do u fine I got 1 of these and they are really good noisey but good
Dangit all, I already cut for the psu I've got. Well, it will just have to do. Thanks a ton for the link. Maybe my next server will have a zippy.
