Calculating power for a Mini-ITX w/ 8 Sata drives

[Cheshire]

I'm looking at building myself a small NAS-ish appliance for home use.

I'm looking at getting a Mini-ITX Intel D510MO (2 SATA ports), adding a PCI card (4 SATA ports), and a miniPCIe card (2 SATA ports).

This brings me to a total of 8 SATA ports.

To the question;

What size PSU do I need to run 8 3.5" 7200rpm drives in this configuration?

I'm trying to be dollar conscious and avoid overbuying.

Thank you very very much for any help figuring this out!

-Aaron

 

[Jesse B]

What drives do you plan on using? Standard drives tend to use ~10W each, while the "green" drives are closer to 6W or 7W each. Mind you, when they all turn on they will draw more current, so you may want to stagger the spin-up of the drives.

This website is quite helpful for getting a rough estimate:
http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp

 

[Cheshire]

I was aiming for ~ 6-8 Seagate Baracuba 500gB 7200rpm drives.

I presume it would be complicated / unfeasible to have a proper staggered spin-up with all the different cards I had planned to use?

I can't tell if the D510MO has a staggered spin-up as a standard feature.

Thank you for the calculator, but its results said I needed a 34W PSU....
(I'm really not planning to run anything other than Sata drives on the Atom D510)

 

[Jesse B]

I got about 115W when I ran the calculator. I'm not sure if the Atom boards support staggered spin up either. You may need to just buy a large enough supply to compensate for the high current draw on startup.

 

[Cheshire]

Ya, I'm having trouble confirming if the D510MO handles it or not.

I do know that some people have used highpoint SATA cards to stagger spinup, but that is breaking my low price point objective just on the card. Still need to get a mobo & PSU somehow xD

My results did seem as though they were completely ignoring the 8 HDDs I had assigned, and your result suggests the 120w is the right focus. (and in line with someon other hersay info I found).

Looks like I have 3 options:

1. get a fancy highpoint Sata card that will handle the staggered spinup.
2. get a fancy mobo that handles the staggered spinup its self
3. spend 75$ on a full PSU instead of 50$ on a picoPSU and use a bit more space and have a fan to deal with.

And here I was hopping to hit the holy grail of computer building and getting it cheap, reliable, and easy. xD

if I bump up my price point of <100$ for mobo to <150$... any feasible alternatives?

 

[Jesse B]

Rather than 8 500GB drives, would it not be easier (and cheaper as well) to run less, larger drives? Samsung's F4 2TB drives (only 5400rpm, but have excellent performance, average around 120MB/s read, IIRC) are only $110 on Newegg.

 

[Cheshire]

I'm using the Seagate 500gB drives as I have a lot laying around, so they have a price point of 0$. I also have a few spare 1gB sticks of 5300 DDR2 ram. This focuses my only pricing concerns on the mobo, psu, and Sata card(s).

Hard to find PCI Sata cards > 4 slots at a reasonable price, and I've only seen the highpoints (bloody expensive) with built in staggering spin up.

This will be a NAS box, so the choke point will be the ~70mB/s expectation across the ethernet.


A mobo with passive cooling, an intel 1000mb nic, and staggered spin-up support would be ideal, and arguably worth 150-200$.

As it avoids expensive highpoint cards (250$+ ea), and avoids the need for an atx psu (noisy, hot, big).

 

[MrUmunhum]

Have you made any progress??