Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion
$20 if you make me a 6' Molex cable. $10 for recommending a better solution.
Shades:
How come your drive is eating so much power to begin with?
My external HD enclosure came with a power supply that delivered 12Volt and 1.5Ampere as output. That would make 18 watt and it was not bigger than wall charger for a cell phone. Building a power supply with high voltage is rather simple and cheap, but if it has to deliver a decent amperage...
The hard drive in that enclosure was an IDE Western Digital Caviar 160GByte 7200rpm. Ran nice for four years with the original power supply (in ambient temperatures from 40 degrees Celsius and above). Putting a faster 10000rpm drive in an external enclosure seems overkill as you would hit the bandwidth limit of the USB channel you are using and it does not require that much more power.
50 to 80 Watts, it seems a lot to me. Dividing 80Watts with 12Volt results in a device that uses 4 to 6 Ampere. Has it a double function as electrical heater? Or as a cigarette lighter similar to the ones found in old cars? A standard ATX power supply like my own 350Watts power supply requires about 10Ampere (at full capacity) from the electrical grid it is connected to.
superboyac:
Hmmm...Shades, you bring up a good point. Why is the drive consuming so much power? Well, who knows. Actually, I'm an electrical engineer by profession, I should know the answer, but I don't know anything about how hard drives and stuff work.
Anyway, here's the deal. The enclosure is from Granite Digital, an excellent company with fabulous customer support. I love their products. I've been thinking about it and I believe I have come up with the best solution. I've asked them if i can return the enclosure I have for store credit and use it to buy a 2-bay enclosure of the same type. Why? Because, first of all, their 2-bay enclosure comes with a built in 300w power supply. Secondly, my enclosure cost about $70 and their 2-bay enclosure is on sale for $100. So it wouldn't cost me that much in the end anyway. I also have a couple of spare 500gb drives lying around that could be used. So, that's my solution.
As for the drive consuming a lot of power, the answer I got from Granite Digital is that the external power supply that comes with the unit can support most drives, but with the drives getting so big now 1-2TB, their power consumption is getting a little too big for these power supplies. The model of this power supply is listed for 34W, but I don't know what that actually means. I haven't read anywhere of a hard drive using 34W of power or even close to it, but the actual values of all these things are always vastly different than their listed values. So whatever.
app103:
Another idea that seems so obvious that I don't understand why it wasn't mentioned already:
You could mount the HD in one of your spare 5.25 inch bays using mounting brackets or an internal enclosure with a rack. Then you could hook up the HD directly to your PC's power supply and motherboard. This is assuming you have a spare 5.25 inch bay to begin with.
If there is an issue with it being a PATA drive and there only being SATA capabilities on your motherboard, then you can use a controller card to fix that problem. (there are also SATA controller cards, too, in case you have maxed that out already, and that was your reason for using an external enclosure)
superboyac:
Another idea that seems so obvious that I don't understand why it wasn't mentioned already:
You could mount the HD in one of your spare 5.25 inch bays using mounting brackets or an internal enclosure with a rack. Then you could hook up the HD directly to your PC's power supply and motherboard. This is assuming you have a spare 5.25 inch bay to begin with.
If there is an issue with it being a PATA drive and there only being SATA capabilities on your motherboard, then you can use a controller card to fix that problem. (there are also SATA controller cards, too, in case you have maxed that out already, and that was your reason for using an external enclosure)
-app103 (July 18, 2009, 01:53 AM)
--- End quote ---
Ha! Yeah, it wasn't mentioned because I want to use it as an external drive. I should have made that more clear. Believe me, my computer has PLENTY of 5.25 bays and plenty of spare SATA spaces on the motherboard. This is the super computer I built following the recommendations of everyone here at DC earlier this year. There's a whole thread on it.
No, I still think I'm going to go for that 2-bay solution. I'm just waiting to hear back from Granite Digital and I hope they'll give me store credit for this enclosure.
f0dder:
That kind of power consumption sounds like a big wtf to me - unless you're talking a NAS box and not just a simple USB/firewire/whatever enclosure. A WD MyBook draws 15W during spinup, ~8W during idle, and ~11W during read (didn't bother testing write). That bigger drives should require more power also sounds a bit silly, imho only faster rpm and (perhaps) more spindles would require more juice.
You say their two-drive enclosure is 300W? That's hopefully a NAS box with RAID functionality, otherwise I'd stay way clear of that company :)
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version