Drives to power ratio

[warbaby71]

hello everyone. just a little question as im not sure about power ratios etc.
i could already be over the limit for all i know (but im not having problems)
ok i have a 300w psu going at the moment running the mainboard, 3 hdd,1 dvd rw and a geforce 6600. i need more hdd space and my only option at this time is add another hdd which i have sitting about and wonder if that is doable with that psu, so far with all that running i have no issues but i could already be overloading for all i know.. some opinions would be helpfull.. thanks
simon

 

[HillJack]

I have an Antec TruePower 2.0 480W power supply, an AMD Athlon XP 2600+, 3 200GB IDE hard drives, a DVD-RW, a DVD-ROM and Gigabyte Radeon 9250 video card ... With everything on (no drives asleep or anything), APC's PowerChute (my UPS software) reports a total power draw of 156W at about 10% cpu-load, and 182W at 100% cpu-load. With a quality 300W power supply, you should be fine, imo.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that those power values include 3 wireless routers, a switch and a cable modem that are also plugged in to my UPS. So you can probably substract 50-60W from the above power draws to approximate your own... you should be even better off

 

[Nodsu]

Just plug the drive in, insert a disc into the DVD drive and try to start up the machine. Drives draw the most power during the startup - if your machine boots and all the drives are detected, then you have plenty of power.