On Fri, 2011-12-30 at 13:16 +0100, Mattias Wadenstein wrote:

On Fri, 30 Dec 2011, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:

quoted

On Thu, 29 Dec 2011, Jeremy Thompson wrote:

quoted

I thought about this as well - I have an Enermax 450 in there right now... 
I'll have to look for a higher watt power supply next I guess.

Also look at how your feeds are balanced. Some PSUs have two rails, putting 
all drives on a single rail causes your load handling capacity to go down 
significantly. I recommend getting a single rail PSU as well, well above the 
capacity you think you need.

Not only that, take a good look at both the 5V and 12V specs, and compare 
them to the draw needed by the drives (and the rest of the system). I've 
found that the ammount of 5V available varies lots between PSUs, without 
much correlation with the 12V supply. Which is fine for modern CPUs/GPUs 
which mostly uses 12V, but drives seem to want quite a bit of 5V too.

One other common problem with multiple rail PSUs is that often all the 
useful power connectors (sata/molex) are only on one rail. I wouldn't mind 
multiple rails if I could actually use all of them for drives.

For the 24-drive home build I've done, I've actually ended up running two 
PSUs in parallel (joining ground), but this is hardly something to 
recommend to anyone sane. ;)

I can give you my recommendation for a power supply based on my box.
The box has 22 drives (all 7200), dual core Phenom II, 8 Gig ram.
The PS is a OCZ ModXstream Pro 700. It has been running for over a year
without showing any problems. In a normal steady state the box draws 260
Watts from the wall as measures by a Kill-A-Watt device.

K