PSU Requirements for RAID

Z

ZeroH

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 20, 2006
Messages
442
Hey All,

Just curious... what's your PSU rated at that powers your RAID system? I have a 600W PSU for 6drives, mobo, raid card, video card, and a dvd burner. When I add another drive, the box constantly reboots. I'm wondering if I need to upgrade the PSU. What do you use for your RAID and what does it power?

Thanks!
 
RAID has nothing to do with power requirements. With all that being said however, I ran my Q6600 (at 3.6ghz), with a HD4850, and 22 hard drives off my PC P&C 610w power supply. You need a decent power supply (preferably single rail or with large rails).
 
I have
Asus A8N SLI Deluxe
AMD 4200 x2
4x512mb DDR400
9500GT
Azuntech X-Plosion
2xRocketRaid 2300
11 hard drives
Corsair 620HX

It's been running for over 2 years now in that configuration without any hiccups.
 
What video card are you using? It's possible your video card draws more juice under load than all of your hard drives put together.

Most drives draw a peak of 9 watts on 12V and 3 watts on 5V during routine operation. Some of the reduced spindle speed drives out there (Caviar Green, Samsung Eco Green, etc) can get in under 6 watts on 12V. Spinup current varies, that can get as high as 24 watts on 12V, although this period is very short.

Constantly reboots...have you disabled automatic restart on system failure? Your box may be blue screening and saving the dump file so quickly you don't even see the blue screen.

http://www.google.com/search?q=disa...s=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
 
Thanks for the replies.. I knew I had enough power.. just wanted to make sure.

good point blue fox. but I wanted to get replies from folks with raid systems who will most likely have a similar layout rather than the general public. Hence, the reference to RAID. I use a seasonice s-12 which is a very good psu IMO. I'm also using an nvidia geforce 8500 which shouldn't be drawing a lot of power.

DougLite, thanks for the suggestion. I'll try that.

maddude, how do you have two raid cards running on that board? Do you use both pci-e slots? what about the video card? Just curious because I was thinking of running two cards but I didn't think I could get another one in.
 
Just curious, do you guys think a single Corsair 450W PSU would be able to power 16 drives (+ 1 OS drive) comfortably? It's also powering a Gigabyte mATX motherboard with 2 x 2GB sticks of RAM, a 3ware 9650SE-16ML and a Core 2 Duo e6400.
 
I had 16 drives + mobo, cpu, 2 x raid cards all on corsair 620 without any issues, I think the 450W should do the trick but if you haven't bought it yet its always better to go too big then not big enough.

My current file server with 21hdds, xeon cpu, server mobo and areca raid card runs on corsair 1000HX, probably an overkill but I like to have spare power and not have to worry about it.
 
Syntax Error said:
Just curious, do you guys think a single Corsair 450W PSU would be able to power 16 drives (+ 1 OS drive) comfortably? It's also powering a Gigabyte mATX motherboard with 2 x 2GB sticks of RAM, a 3ware 9650SE-16ML and a Core 2 Duo e6400.
Click to expand...
You may want to ask in the power supply forum. Grabbing a drive I have in the parts bin (a 320GB Maxtor SATA, FWIW), I see a 12V rating of .52A and 5V of .72A. The VX450 has 33A on +12, so you should be ok there (17 drives is only ~10A, leaving over 20 for the CPU, fans, etc). 5V is much closer... .72A * 17 drives is about 12A, which only leaves 8A for the rest of the system.
 
Well, it was a BIOS update that fixed the issue. Seems to be a common problem with the ASUS A8N32-SLI board and XP SP3. Thanks all.
 
ZeroH said:
Well, it was a BIOS update that fixed the issue. Seems to be a common problem with the ASUS A8N32-SLI board and XP SP3. Thanks all.
Click to expand...
Was the system blue screening or simply restarting?
 
DougLite said:
Was the system blue screening or simply restarting?
Click to expand...

Yes, it was BSOD'ing like crazy.. Thanks for the suggestion for disabling the autorestart. Here's the message for anyone else that could be having the same problem.

The bios in this system is not fully ACPI compliant. Please contact your system vendor for an updated bios. If you are unable to obtain an updated bios or the latest bios supplied by your vendor is not ACPI compliant, you can turn off ACPI mode during text mode setup. To do this, simply press the F7 key when you are prompted to install storage drivers. The system will not notify you that the F7 key was pressed - it will silently disable ACPI and allow you to continue your installation."

STOP Error: STOP: 0x000000A5 (xxxxxxx, xxxxxxx,xxxxxxx,...)

I googled the message and a ton of hits came up that pointed to a recommended BIOS update. All is well now.
 
ZeroH said:
maddude, how do you have two raid cards running on that board? Do you use both pci-e slots? what about the video card? Just curious because I was thinking of running two cards but I didn't think I could get another one in.
Click to expand...

I was running one, needed more storage, added another. You can't span the RAID across these two cards, so each one is set up for a RAID 5. They pretty much are entry level cards, but I've been running them for about 2 years now without problem. They are each in a PCI-e slot, the video card is in the main PCI-e 16 slot, and I'm even running a Saber VistaView 2020 in the second PCI-e 16 slot. Find me a board and I'll fill it! :eek:
 
axan said:
I had 16 drives + mobo, cpu, 2 x raid cards all on corsair 620 without any issues, I think the 450W should do the trick but if you haven't bought it yet its always better to go too big then not big enough.

My current file server with 21hdds, xeon cpu, server mobo and areca raid card runs on corsair 1000HX, probably an overkill but I like to have spare power and not have to worry about it.
Click to expand...

Stagger the hard drive startups perhaps? I think it should be OK though as long as you're not using like a GTX 290 OC. Or an ATI.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top