internaughtfull said:
While most of the time, supplies follow the ATX standard,
even some of the big companies have put non-standard supplies
in their computers. Before buying another supply, you have
to do enough research first, to satisfy yourself that you're
dealing with the standard design. To help you, these three
generations of specifications, have suggested wire colors,
which you can compare to the wire colors on your power supply
cables.
http://web.archive.org/web/20030424061333/http://www.formfactors.org/...
http://www.formfactors.org/developer/specs/atx/ATX12V_1_3dg.pdf
http://www.formfactors.org/developer/specs/ATX12V_PSDG_2_2_public_br2...
I forgot to mention that it was an Antec SL400. It lasted a long time
so I will
probably go with another Antec. Hopefully that will make the swap out
easy.
A local computer shop here has an Antec SP500 for about 50$. I looked
up the specs on it which said 'has three SATA compatible connections'.
However I do have four small [40g] ATA drives, the older EIDE ones.
Will that make any difference? Thanks for the advice and information.
itchy
My Antec failed, because of bad capacitors. The capacitors on the
output side started to leak electrolyte. I could hear a muffled "arcing"
sound at startup. A couple days later, it was crashing in the BIOS, and
that is when I replaced mine. I suspect the power supplies they
contracted from ChannelWell (CWT) have that problem. Antec doesn't make
their own supplies, which is why it helps to know who makes
a particular product of theirs, to understand what you're
getting. In any given year, they use more than one supplier.
You can get "Y" cables for Molex disk drives, to make more connectors.
http://images17.newegg.com/is/image/newegg/12-198-025-S01?$S640W$
SATA power connectors are not suitable for the same kind of
"Y cable" trick, since the SATA power contacts have a lower
current rating than the Molex ones. So the Molex connectors
are the best thing to start with, in terms of chaining together
cabling. A power supply full of SATA connectors, is a poor deal
if you need to extend the cabling to power more loads.
Hard drives draw their peak current at startup, and can draw
2.5 amps from 12V for the first 10 seconds. Then, the drive
settles down to a much lower current. Like 0.6 amps from 12V.
A set of wires from the power supply, should be good for at
least 10 amps, which is sufficient to start four drives without
a concern. Once the drives are started, you could in theory
support a larger number of drives.
And you can tell when you have too much load on a Molex cable.
I have a video card, with a 1x4 Molex power connector on the
end. I added an extra hard drive to the same cable as the video
card was on, and just when I started to play a 3D game, the
hard drive made a "spin down and spin up" sound. That
tells you the voltage is dropping too low on the Molex cabling.
The hard drive can sense the voltage level on the cable, so it knows
what is going on. Once I removed one load from that set of wires,
the hard drive stopped doing that. So if you don't own a voltmeter
to check, hearing "click and clunk" from your disk drive, is all the
evidence you need, that the voltage is dropping too low
on that chain of cables.
Paul
