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Seasonic Power Supply capable of handling ten hard drives?

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  • Power Supplies
  • Hard Drives
  • Components
  • Seasonic
Last response: in Components
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April 3, 2014 8:14:14 AM

Good morning,

I have a Seasonic X-400 gold power supply in my server and am having issues with drives dropping out of my array. I am concerned that my power supply is not powerful enough for the system. My system specs:

Intel Xeon E3-1240 V2
Intel Server Board S1200BTL
8GB of ECC memory
2x LSI 9211-8i controllers
120GB SSD
10x Seagate Barracuda 2TB

I currently am running three Molex ---> 4 SATA power adapters from a single Molex cable. This Molex cable is thus powering my ten hard drives and the SSD. Is this simply too much for my power supply? I'm not positive if those drives are running off the 5V rail which is rated at 20 amps or the 12V rail. Frankly I'm a little confused at the difference.

Thank you for your advice, sorry for poor grammar as I typed on mobile!

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a b ) Power supply
April 3, 2014 8:36:16 AM

Hard drives load both the 5V and 12V supply. The mechanical draws from the 12V, the logic draws from the 5V. The largest draw will be on your 12V rail.

I think you may be a little underpowered there. I would consider a 500 - 550W quality power supply. Preferably something with enough SATA power connectors so you don't have to use adapters, or at least not as many.
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April 3, 2014 7:44:14 PM

Thanks for your reply. I looked up the rating on the PSU. The 5v rail is rated at 20A and the 12v rail at 33A. Do you still believe this to be insufficient? I noticed that Seasonic's platinum 520W kept the same 20A on 5v while the 12v gets bumped to 43A. The 660W is only ten bucks more but on the 5v and 12v rail jumps to 25A and 55A respectively. Do you believe this is worth upgrading to? I don't know of any PSU that will be able to power 10 hard drives without at least a couple molex to 4 SATA power adapters.

Thanks!
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a b ) Power supply
April 3, 2014 10:17:02 PM

Current ratings are a little tricky, if you were to add up all the power on the 3.3V, 5V, 12V and the other minor rails, it would exceed the maximum rating. For instance the 12V rail is rated at 33A which is 396W which is nearly the rating for the entire power supply. Essentially the current ratings of each rail is the maximum that rail can supply with all other rails unloaded or very low loads. So you must add up the load placed on all the rails to arrive at the total load. If this total load exceeds the total power rating of the supply one or more of the rails will drop below the ATX standard. Usually the rail with the biggest load drops out first. In most systems this would be the 12V supply.

Something like this might be OK:

Seasonic 550W PSU

It has 6 SATA and 5 molex, so you should be able to reduce the number of adapters.
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