Power Supply Question & HD Power Consumption

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Savage1701

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I have a server that I would like to upgrade to 20 1TB Hitachi HD's. They claim max startup current of 2A. and idling down in the .5A range. The platform will be a 775-series X48 with a 6600 Core Duo. Graphics card is small, does not even require aux power connector. Not needed to just supply the KVM with 1280x1024. No other signficiant sources of 12V drain exist other than the MB/CPU, a slim CD-Drive for installs, a slim floppy, and one additional 30GB SSD startup drive (2W when active).

I am looking at an 850W Corsair. I've heard these are quality supplies and I don't want multiple rails since no one really knows what sort of Voodoo goes on as to how they divide multiple rails up. And I don't want to get into that. I will be using a single-rail +12V PS. I can add a second if I need to but I'd rather not.

Do you think this will be sufficient for handling 20 Hitachi hard drives? "Green" drives are a non-starter since they will drive my Raid 6 controller, and then me, off the deep end with TLER issues. I do have staggered spin-up control of the drives with the controller.

Thanks for any help.
 
Power Supply Question & HD Power Consumption, Pt. 2 - Laptop vs. 3.5"

My second question is this - I have a BTV server that needs to be on at all times during the season to record shows during day and evening.

Suffice it to say that you CANNOT reliably put one of the critters into sleep/hibernate mode and expect it to wake up and reliably record a show. It just won't happen.

Now, this is one case where I can use "Green" 3.5" drives, but I am also considering banking 500GB 7200RPM or even 5400RPM laptop drives. These will all be on a raid controller, but since they will be in pass-thru mode or RAID 0 mode the controller won't freak over TLER like it would with RAID 5/6 and mark the drives bad. The controller also has more than adequate cache to handle a 5400RPM spindle as OTA HDTV generates little more than 2.5MB per second per channel. Even 4 channels at once is 10MB/s and that should not tap the ability of a 3Ware controller with cache on 5400 RPM RAID 0 or even pass-thru drives.

My question is this - 2 500GB laptop drives burn much less startup and idle current than a single 1TB 3.5" drive. Has anyone tried running multiple laptop drives on a RAID controller, and what sort of luck have you had? What sort of sustained throuput can you obtain?

Electricity is a huge factor here, at 12 cents per KWh. I can recover the marginal cost of 2 500GB laptop drives vs. 1 1TB 3.5 drive.

Case construction and drive cages are not the issue here.
 
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