Don't know much about the PSU game. How much power do I need for 8 SATA drives?

R

RavinDJ

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Apr 9, 2002
Messages
4,448
My 700W PSU just crapped out. I'm guessing it was overloaded. But, it's been working fine for a couple of years now.

I have an older AMD CPU (probably 95W) and 8 SATA drives. How much power do I really need?

What modular PSU would you recommend for me? Any input will be appreciated. Thanks!!
 
each SATA 7200RPM Disk drive, when running full-pelt, will consume anywhere from 20-50w depending on type. I don't think the drives caused the issue.
 
KazeoHin said:
each SATA 7200RPM Disk drive, when running full-pelt, will consume anywhere from 20-50w depending on type. I don't think the drives caused the issue.
Click to expand...

Good point. Any idea what it could be? I tried with 3 drives plugged in and it boot up. But when I connected all 8, then it won't boot. It'll start up for literally only half a second or a quarter of a second, the fans will start, but then immediately everything will shut down.

The old PSU won't power up even the mobo alone. The 650W temporary PSU will power up mobo and 3 drives. Didn't try it with 4 or 5 or 6 to find the exact number.

I'm thinking 850W just in case? Or, any other thoughts on what it could be??? It's my home server and I'd like to get it up and running ASAP.

Thanks for the quick response, KazeoHin!!
 
No problem.

In my experience, quality of brand matters more than wattage. I would gladly take a Gold rated Cooler Master 600w over a Golden Lucky 900w

I have a ten-year-old Antec 600w that still powers my overclocked, water cooled media centre.

You shouldn't need more than a 700w 80+ bronze to get done what you need, it just needs to be a halfway decent brand. HARDOCP does some intense PSU reviews, so anything those boys recommend is worth it's money.
 
Spinners pull the most power coming up to speed, either power on or coming out of sleep.

Some higher end controllers can stagger the power on events.

20W is a good number to budget for that spinup power. They will pull much less than that once they are up to speed and spinning though - down in the 1-5W range.

It’s remotely possible that a drive went out (shorted), and it’s dragging everything else down. Fortunately that’s fair easy to test - if each drive can power up and and shows up in he BIOS one at a time.

The more likely answer is that your PSU is just on the fritz and about to let out the magic smoke.
 
RavinDJ said:
My 700W PSU just crapped out. I'm guessing it was overloaded. But, it's been working fine for a couple of years now.

I have an older AMD CPU (probably 95W) and 8 SATA drives. How much power do I really need?

What modular PSU would you recommend for me? Any input will be appreciated. Thanks!!
Click to expand...

700W is huge. 8 SATA drives would requires at most 20W (and likely on a bad day).

Major consumers are the CPU, GPU (which can account for more than the CPU) and possibly memory, if you have a lot. 700W is big enough for a large server with 2 physical socket large core count CPUs plus a ton of memory (e.g. >256G) and 8+ high rpm drives. 700W is more than sufficient for most GPU setups, but maybe not two high end cards. Depends.
 
Sig build crapped out a Seasonic 860 Platinum when I went from 16gb to 64gb ram.

Unless you are pulling out a multimeter to test and log your PSU consider most owners running their pc like a Honda without changing the oil until it dies.

Figure 5 years on it, it was an RMA replacement I got from here.
If Seasonic denies me bc warranty was never transferred, I figure I got my $ worth given what I've achieved with it.
 
I rather doubt it was overloaded. I've got a 550W PSU in a machine with 1x SSD and 8x HDD's. Never sees more than ~300W at the wall according to the UPS. (that's full cpu load with the drives being written to, rather rare)
 
somebrains said:
Sig build crapped out a Seasonic 860 Platinum when I went from 16gb to 64gb ram.

Unless you are pulling out a multimeter to test and log your PSU consider most owners running their pc like a Honda without changing the oil until it dies.

Figure 5 years on it, it was an RMA replacement I got from here.
If Seasonic denies me bc warranty was never transferred, I figure I got my $ worth given what I've achieved with it.
Click to expand...

Curious.

Exactly how would you test to predict the failure you had with a multimeter?
 
Look up the drive models it will tell you.

I have an 850w PSU gold in a dual Xeon rig with 128G ECC ram and 4 x 3TB drives, 2 x 750G 2.5 Drives a 256G SSD and a 960G SSD and an AMD 570 46 and full load i barely break 500w gaming....
 
My media/file/Plex/Kodi server has a Corsair TX 750 powering 3 x 300GB, 5 x 1TB, 1 x 2TB, 2 x 3TB, 2 x 4TB, 2 x 8TB (all spinners).
A PII X4 975 BE @ 4GHz -8GB GSkill 1600MHz DDR3 - on board HD 4250 - H60 AIO - 3 x 200mm LED - 4 x 180mm LED - 2 x SATA RAID cards - Zalman 6ch fan controller.
Utorrent always dl'ing, Handbrake runs about 8hrs a day, with Plex bringing up the rear. This rig has spent most of it's life @ 100% CPU usage since 2012.
The TX 750 still has room to grow (with adapters) and barely gets warm. At any giving time I have no less than 6 out 15 HDD's running concurrently.

IMAO, 700w is overkill for your setup. I think your PSU just shit the bed due to age, craftsmanship, heat etc. or a combination of all. I don't think overloading was your issue.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top