Power supply and drives question

[lucasbuck2]

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but never dealt with it before. My home built machine (majors specs of stuff I thought might be important below) which has 6 drives, 5 HD and 1 DVD.
I'm out of SATA connectors on the MB, but need 1 more HD. If I put in a SATA controller card, and another drive or two, will I run into any power issues? Any other issues I'm not aware of? I've never ran that many drives, so any advise would be appreciated. Thanks!

- Windows 7 64 bit

- EVGA 141-BL-E757-TR LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX X58 SLI LE Intel Motherboard

- CORSAIR Enthusiast Series CMPSU-850TX 850W ATX12V v2.2 / EPS12V v2.91 SLI Certified CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Power Supply

- Intel Core i7-920 Bloomfield 2.66GHz 4 x 256KB L2 Cache 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor BX80601920

- ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series (running dual, cloned monitors)

 

[blackhawk1928]

Your 850watt powersupply should have no problem handling extra HDD's. Not to mention it is made by a great brand.

 

[lucasbuck2]

Thanks. What would be the max? I probably wouldn't go past the 5 in it +2 (so 7). And is that the best way to add more drives, just put in an internal SATA card into an open slot?

 

[MysticMiner]

HDD's and controllers don't use that much power, compared to say a GPU. If your PSU is operating fine, it should not be a problem with what you would normally fit inside a case.

If you're going for swarms and swarms of HDDs, then you're making a mistake doing it by hand anyway.

A max is really hard to calculate though, since we don't know the performance of your PSU, or how much you draw off it in your operations. It'd be possible to figure out, but you'd have to have a meter yourself to measure it.

 

[blackhawk1928]

Thanks. What would be the max? I probably wouldn't go past the 5 in it +2 (so 7). And is that the best way to add more drives, just put in an internal SATA card into an open slot?

You can connect 15 more HDDs to your PSU...it will handle it fine. 850watts is a LOT of power.

 

[lucasbuck2]

Thanks for all the input. Mystic: What's the alternative to by hand, and what do you consider a swarm?

 

[MysticMiner]

Buying equipment made by somebody as a mass-storage device, such as a HDD Array from somebody like Cisco, or Drobo, or whoever. It be a local direct attachment or on the network, depending on your needs.

The exact point where you switch over from doing it yourself to buying a made product depends on what your data storage issues are. If your data is valuable enough, you might do it immediately to get RAID 5 support. And of course, capacities have grown, being able to hold a Terabyte in my hand is quite the day from when a HDD used to be much smaller...and I have seen some of the refrigerator sized units, those are amusing.