Hard Drives on 12v or 5v?

D

DBZ33

Gawd
Joined
Jul 10, 2005
Messages
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Does a hard drive pull power from the 12v line or the 5v line? I have a 465w PS with 30a on the 5v line and now I want to upgrade to a 750w PS that has 28a on the 5v. I have 6 300gb hard drives now and im going to get 5 more 500gb very soon. I don't want to make a mistake on the new PS. The PS I have and the new one are in the links below. Thanks for the help.


OLD PS. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817194011

NEW PS http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817153036
 
LoL, I would certainly hope 750 watts is enough for hard drives...

I'm not a huge fan of Thermaltake PSU's, but that one has more than enough power for drives. I have a client who has a file server with 11 hard drives running on a 430watt Antec with no problems.
 
I also have dual Xeons @3.2GHz, 2gb Ram. Two DVD-RW, Two TV tuners,, and a EVGA 6600GT. Plus all the Hard drives I want to run.
 
The Dual Xeons are really the only thing that requries a fair amount of power in that system.... Drives don't really consume much and neither do standard PCI cards. The 6600GT uses less than 45watts.
 
If you're not staggering the spinup, a new power supply wouldn't hurt - assuming 3A of draw from the 12V rail isn't a bad idea, and Seagate 7200.10 750GB drives actually get to 2.5A. But if spinup is staggered, you don't need a new power supply - even at full seek, only about 1A of 12V power is needed.

The 6600 doesn't have a pci-express power connector, correct? In that case it's drawing from the first 12V rail, and all you're running on the other rail is hard drives and optical drives.
 
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