[PLUG] terabyte upgrade

Quentin Hartman qhartman at gmail.com
Wed Jun 3 18:47:57 UTC 2009


On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 9:35 AM, Daniel Herrington <herda05 at gmail.com> wrote:

> All,
>
> I'm looking into expanding my file storage. To that end, Pricewatch has
> memorylabs.com selling terabyte disks for 84.50. I was going to put 3 of
> them in my Ubuntu 8.1 machine (file server). I'm wondering if I would need
> to upgrade my power supply or anything else before I put them into the
> machine.
>

Totally depends on what else is in the machine, including the capacity of
the existing PSU. If everything is typical of a "stock" whitebox desktop,
you'll probably be fine so long as your PSU is rated 350 watts or more and
isn't a total bargain-basement cheapie model. Typical modern drives draw
less than 10 watts when running so their needs are pretty small really.
However, they may pull a lot more than that (I've seen as much as 30 watts)
when they spin up. If start up draw is a problem, you may have an option to
stagger the drive start inyour BIOS which can get around that.

If you have other power-hungry components (most notably high-end video
cards) you will probably need more than that. Anything over 500 watts is
overkill though unless you know for sure you need it, and even then, you
usually don't. As a point of reference, I have an upper-mid-end /
lower-high-end gaming machine (Major components include: single Raptor HDD,
AMD X2 6000+ (125W TDP), Nvidia 9600GT video) that draws about 300 Watts
under load.

Also an interesting point of reference, most power supplies operate most
efficiently around 50% of their rated load. See
http://www.80plus.org/manu/psu/psu_join.aspx for more info, particularly
their test protocol document.

QH



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