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200W Sufficient For Two Hard Disks?

M

Mr Milquetoast

Weaksauce
Joined
Apr 15, 2005
Messages
114
I was going to buy an ASUS T2-AE1 barebones system for use as a home file server. I was going to put a 300GB Maxtor Maxline III and a 200GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10 into but it only has a 200W power supply.

Will the power supply be sufficient for two hard disks and a low spec AGP graphics (one that only takes power from the AGP socket and doesn’t require any other power) or will it likely be unstable?

Thanks for the advice.
 
It should be fine.

Would be best if we see the entire parts list, though.

You should have also posted this in the power supplies forum, imho.
 
7200 RPM drives typically take about 30-35 watts to spin up, and after that only around 10-15 for normal operation. You should be fine as long as you dont have a power hungry CPU.
 
Samsung and Hitachi disks are excellent choices for low power consumption. A five platter Hitachi drive uses less current than a three platter Maxtor. However, even Maxtor disks pull less than 1A on +12, that's a pretty light 12 watts, plus about .6A on +5, for a total of about 15W like tdg estimated. If you switched to Hitachi or Samsung drives, you could probably get that figure under 10W.

As long as the PSU provides adequate +12 current and you keep those Maxtor drives cool, you should not experience any issues.
 
Yep, sorry wrong forum. Just had small form factor PCs on the brain and wasn’t thinking.

Thanks a lot for the advice. Unfortunately I already have the hard disks so I’m stuck with the Maxtors rather than a lower power Hitachi. I was going to have them in other PCs and share them but then I thought I may as well have a dedicated file server.

The full component list is:

ASUS T2-AE1 Barebones system
AMD Sempron 64 3000+
XFX GeForce 6200 256MB
Geil 2x512MB DDR400 CAS 2.5 RAM
Maxtor Maxline III 300GB 7200rpm SATA Hard Disk
Maxtor Diamond Max 10 200GB 7200rpm SATA Hard Disk
Sony 16x DVD Driver
Sony Floppy Disk Drive

I’m still not sure whether to bother with the graphics card since it has onboard graphics. The XFX 6200doesn’t have a separate power supply or even a fan so I don’t imagine it would use that much power.

200W didn’t sound like a lot and I didn’t want it crashing all the time but it sounds like it should be ok. Thanks again for the help.
 
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