430w or 500w PSU?

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Sparkyy

[H]ard|Gawd
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I want to move my server from being 11 - 250s down to just 5 - 1TB hard drives, plus possibly another 3 sata drives as well, I currently have an Antec True 430watt PSU but the efficiency is about 68% or less. :eek:
I was looking at the Earthwatts 500 since its 80+ efficiency but a 500 or even the 430w should be more then enough to power a p4 2.4 with a pci-x sata card and 8 sata hard drives with no problem or should I look at something a little higher just to be on the safe side? :confused:
Thanks.
 
If your 430W was doing fine with more HDDs there shouldn't be a reason to need anything more than 500Ws when you are reducing the amount of things that need power. Plus going 80plus is bawler planning on doing it myself, once I find the right deal @ the right Ws
 
Well actually my server with 11 - 250s and everything else (see sig) is a 1k psu, heh, so it is not even running on this 430w.
 
Damn, I was thinking you were running 11 hd's with the 430 too. I was going to ask how many splitters you had to use to hook them all up...

For awhile I was running 6 hd's, Opty 185@3ghz, 8800GT, 2gigs of ram on the Antec EarthWatt 500 no problem. I went to a 620hx when I built my new machine, wanted to have a spare to troubleshoot with.
 
Well, I am using an Earthwatts 430w psu in the q6600 rig in my sig, I only have two hard drives but I am running an overclocked q6600 and a 8800gt 24/7.

It seems to be holding up great, I can't wait for my hx520 to get back though.
 
Well lets assume each drives takes 3A on the +12V rail on startup (That's about what my Seagate 1TB drive takes). That's about 24A for 8 drives (assuming that you want 8 drives).

Judging from how much power my 2.53Ghz P4 takes, which is about 100W at startup and assuming all of that is from the +12V (not true but a little overhead doesn't hurt), shoot for a PSU that has at least 33A on the +12V rail. Luckily that Earthwatts 500W has 34A so it should be enough for your server. Though I'd be on the safe side and go with the Corsair 550VX 550W PSU which has 41A on the +12V rail. And it's 80Plus efficient, I think.
 
Thanks, I am actually waiting to get everything because I have two motherboards for this build, my current server mobo which is a p4 2.4ghz with 2 x 256 DDR ECC Ram sticks, or a P3 800mhz mobo with either 128 or 256mb of ram.
I've installed Server 2003 using the P3 and it was surprising not as slow as I thought but I am also looking at the GP RAID edition drives from WD. As I am not concerned about massive amounts of speed as I am the only one that will use it, and I will be using my 3ware 8port PCI-X in the PCI slot of the P3 if I go that route, plus an Intel Gb NIC PCI card too.
So the P3 should need a lot less power seeing how the P3, a 20gb IDE and a CD-Rom took all of 55~60watts to run.
Thanks for your input so far. :)
 
I am running a earthwatts 430 in mine as well they are excellent PSU and they are very quiet too.
 
One more thing I think buying those 800watt or better PSU for regular desktop computers is Stupid I mean most computers never put out over 600watts anyway with SLI, 2 harddrive, and everything else a desktop supercomputer has.
 
Great, a thread crapper, but if you have a 650watt and your computer uses 600, you are dangerously close to having your pc crap out cause not enough power. But it is not about the wattage, it is about the amps that they put out, video cards, hard drives etc all rely heavily on the 12v rail, if that doesn't have enough amps then you won't turn on.

That or you just want a bigger e-peen by getting 8 - 1kw psu's for your massive Pentium and 32mb of ram.
 
carguy83 said:
One more thing I think buying those 800watt or better PSU for regular desktop computers is Stupid I mean most computers never put out over 600watts anyway with SLI, 2 harddrive, and everything else a desktop supercomputer has.
Click to expand...

It's not like you're being forced to buy those 800W PSUs. So don't worry about it.

There is a need for those 800W PSU as long as you have hardware enthusiasts. Yes while a good majority of users don't need such power supplies, there are still quite a bit of users who do need that much power, i.e for their new 20 hard drive server, water cooling rig, quad-SLI rig, etc.
 
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