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Antec vs Enermax

I

IDversusEGO

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Oct 30, 2003
Messages
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seems like the cool thing to do so I figured I would post another head tro head question. I have 2 power supplies sitting on my desk. One is an Enermax Noisetaker 425 watt the other is an Antec True Power 2.0 430 watt. Which would be the best bet for a P4 2.66 file server that holds 11 hard drives and 3 optical drives? is there any descernabale difference?
 
That's alot of harddrives. I would consider a little more power.

Both brands are good and at about the same power. It's not really going to matter which you choose.
 
power calc show me needing right around 380-400. I know it's borderline, but it's what I already have. Instead of spending the $150-200 on a 550 watt PSU I would rather wait and get bigger drives so I can trim the number of drives down. right now I have anything from 40gb to 300gb in there. If I could replace one of the 80x4 arrays with a 300 or 400 gb hard drivee I would be happy.
 
The biggest issue I can see being a problem, and I don't know if it will actually be a problem is that both of those power supplies are dual +12V rail.

Which means the power to your 12V rails are split. I'm not sure how powersupplies are wired, but I *think* when they do that one 12V rail is dedicated to the motherboard and cpu and the other to the rest of the system.

This means that if all your harddrives max out the current capacity of their rail, that they wouldn't be able to tap into the unused current from your older not as power hungry Prescott P4. Where if you had a single 12V rail 430w then your harddrives would have available ALL 12V power unused by your cpu. Is this a problem? I dunno.

This is all speculation. Try it, try to exercise all drives simultaneously and see if you can cause a crash. If things go well, then you may have safe margin because it's unlikely you would hit all of them simultaneously during normal usage.
 
Harddrive don't take that much power. About 10 Watts idleing, 13 watts busy.

Optical drives only a few single watts unless active. Unless they are used for backup purposes it is rare to have more than one optical drive active.

11 harddrives, 3 opticals, that's abotu 150 watts max.

There are some complications, though:

1) they mostly pull on the 5 V so watch that rail

2) power-up can be worse than the 13 watts. You want delayed spinup

3) older harddrives can take a lot more. The above figure is for newest generation 7200rpm drives
 
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