Sata power drain

Churchy · 5 Oct 2006 at 11:30

Im going to be using sata hard drives in a new build with a small 270w psu. I just want to know how many sata drives i could connect befor the small psu becomes an issue

semi-pro waster · 5 Oct 2006 at 11:39

SATA hard drives use the same as any other hard drive(more or less) so allow somewhere in the region of 15w per drive. You can't really ask us to guess how many drives you can use without telling us a bit more about what else will be in the computer though

smids · 5 Oct 2006 at 11:55

And the type/make/model PSU. I have a 270W mATX Enermax PSU in a mATX case - this will power a lot as mATX PSU's are extremely efficient and can power a lot more than you think.

Churchy · 5 Oct 2006 at 12:52

yep ok sorry bout that but was in a bit of a rush with the first post. The psu will be the one for the new mozart case by thermaltake so im asuming it wont be that great

. In case u dont know the mozart case can support 2 systems one being a mini ITX. You can buy a psu that is built for the case which is the one i will be using. All i plan on using this system for is storage so i want be be loading it up with sata drives.

rpstewart · 5 Oct 2006 at 13:05

The problem is likely to be how many that you can spin up at once rather than how many can be run in normal operation, the startup current of HDDs is several times more than their normal operating load. It therefore depends how the disks are going to be attached to the system, for normal motherboard attachment you could run into problems with only 4 or so (depending on CPU etc) but if you're going for external card attachment then with staggered spin up you might get away with more.

smids · 5 Oct 2006 at 13:07

rpstewart said:
The problem is likely to be how many that you can spin up at once rather than how many can be run in normal operation, the startup current of HDDs is several times more than their normal operating load. It therefore depends how the disks are going to be attached to the system, for normal motherboard attachment you could run into problems with only 4 or so (depending on CPU etc) but if you're going for external card attachment then with staggered spin up you might get away with more.

As above. An HDU spinning up will consume about 20-25W each. 4 hard drives = 100W on them alone. Normal operation is only usually about 10-15W however (SATA drives are usually slightly higher in terms of power consumption).

Most modern BIOS's allow for staggered spin up, so it shouldn't be too much of a problem. If not, a lot of external add in cards allow for this.

Churchy · 5 Oct 2006 at 14:02

ok thanks for the info