Which PSU To Power 9 Harddrives And Other Items

mr gothic

hi after a psu for my pc/server[don't think the one I have is good enough] to power 9 harddrives,graphics card,bluray drive,system wont be on 24/7 my system at the moment will be adding a hba pci card to control the extra harddrives on the motherboard,any recommendations to which psu to get would be great,cheers


Intel Core i5-6600 quad core, 3.3-3,9GHz processorEVGA Geforce GTX 1060 Superclocked 6GB Graphics Card (VR Ready) 8GB Corsair DDR4, 2400MHz RAMMSI Z170A G43 PLUS 1151 Motherboard
Kingston A400, 240GB 2.5" Solid State DriveEVGA 500W 80  Bronze rated PSU

EndlessWaves

What makes you think your current PSU isn't good enough?

You haven't said which drives you're looking at but if we assume it's a power hungry model that requires [email protected] to spin up then that's 270W for the drives. The rest of the system will be around 150W. That makes 420W in total, well within the capabilities of your PSU. And as you're attaching some of them to an expansion card they probably won't all be spinning up at the same time anyway. After initial spin-up, power draw is more like [email protected] & [email protected]

You don't give the exact model of PSU but EVGA only entered the market a few years ago so I can't see issues with the wrong distribution of power or similar being very likely and it's a reasonable brand so you shouldn't have issues with wire thickness either.

mr gothic

hi thank you  for your reply not sure model the psu but it looks like this https://www.amazon.co.uk/EVGA-BRONZE-Supply-Tester-100-B1-0500-K3/dp/B01F67KZEC/ref=asc_df_B01F67KZEC/?tag=bingshoppinga-21&linkCode=df0&hvadid=
the guy I bought the system does not think it would be ok to power 9 hard drives.
the drives I would be using are Seagate ironwolf 8tb standard drives[I have my media scattered over smaller drives].
which other psu should I be looking at and which sata/power cables should I be getting are cables separate or have splitters on sorry for my ignorance as I haven't done a build before
cheers

EndlessWaves

Seagate are good at publishing information about their drives, so we know the max power consumption of both voltages:
https://www.seagate.com/www-content/product-content/ironwolf/en-us/docs/100851636b.pdf

Unless the graphics card is very heavily overclocked I don't see anything in that system that could push the limits of that PSU.

Generally PSUs come with all their cables and if you need additional connectors you can either convert another connector with the same voltages or use a splitter. That drive uses 12V and 5V so a Molex/Peripheral to SATA adaptor is usable (SATA can also provide 3.3V which molex connectors don't have).

A trio of molex to 2x SATA adaptors will set you back around three quid:
kenable SATA Power Splitter Cable 4 pin LP4 Molex to 2 x SATA Power

I did have a look at which PSUs had at least 11 SATA connectors and it generally looked like it was only high end £100  models (CCL have a handy filter) so if you do want to go down that route you're not going to go wrong with any choice.

mr gothic

thank you for your detailed response and help getting my head around it.
regards
gary

mr gothic

hi a couple more questions im thinking of buying this psu
EVGA 700 BR 700W 80  Bronze PSU - 100-BR-0700-K3
which has 9 sata 3 conections on each sata cable is it possible to add this splitter
https://www.amazon.co.uk/StarTech-B5196-Power-Splitter-Adapter/dp/B0086OGN9E/ref=sr_1_4?crid=JP9DJ4Y7WE0J&keywords=sata power cable splitter&qid=1561983810&s=gateway&sprefix=sata power cable,aps,400&sr=8-4 to one of the sata conection on the cables with the 3 sata power conections giving me 7 conections on one of the cables,can you see any problems? ive done some research on the molex conections you mentioned and there seems a bit of worry regarding them over heating and catching fire.
cheers
gary

EndlessWaves

Molex connectors were introduced the standard connectors for drives in the IBM PC in the 80s and were used by the ATX standards up until the mid-2000s when SATA connectors were introduced to provide lower voltages and physically smaller connectors for the laptop form factor gaining popularity at that time.

Those early PCs had big 5.25" drives with correspondingly higher power consumption and the Molex connectors have much thicker pins than the SATA connectors that replaced them.

I don't know what you read, but I'd be surprised if there was anything about such a long lived connector that would affect typical use and you haven't mentioned anything about this being a Car PC or something else subject to unusual movement.

The best practice is to spread the load between cables, rather than hanging all the additional draw off a single cable/connector. The PSU you're considering seems to have the following cables:
                                                                                                                                                 

As the molex connectors are on their own cable and are presumably going unused I'd go for either a pair of molex to SATA adaptors or a molex to 2x SATA splitter.

mr gothic

hi thank you for your advise, I was watching a few youtube videos which recomened against using them
youtube molex to sata fire - Bing video

adash

Not sure if you know of this site, but has been great in finding the power requirement of the PC I am building.

You can enter which processor and graphics card you are using along with the drives and fans.

Power Supply Calculator - PSU Calculator | OuterVision

For your PC, it comes with a load wattage of 430W with a usual 1830 boost to the GTX 1060 and recommends a PSU of 486W, so you are good to go with the 500W