Powersupply big enough?

**DiscoStu** · 10 June 2008, 13:59

Originally posted by lilelvis2000 View Post

I have a old box which is a Celeron 800Mhz, w/ 768MB RAM
and 1 11Gig IDE disk, CD-RW, 2 320G WD SATA drives. Plus it
has a PCI NIC, PCI ATI card, PCI SATA card.
It is currently running FreeBSD 7.0 and the two SATA drives are combined as a RAID 1.

Been having some (well lots) of problems with the mirror. It keeps breaking. One of the devices keeps falling over whenever I need to copy, move, extract large files on it. By large I mean 2Gig files.

I then have to rebuild the mirror..which is interesting to say the least.

As this has been happening quite regularly, someone mentioned that perhaps there isn't enough power..or the powersupply is flaky. It is an old machine I got from a charity shop for £30.

It currently has a seasonic 235W power supply. which I reckon should be enough. Is it enough?

The MB is none too happy with my KVM either so just wondering if I should junk the MB and PS and get new ones.

235W?

It's not enough.

**DiscoStu** · 10 June 2008, 14:26

To follow up on my very brief previous post, in a previous life a long time ago I did tech support for PC World. We'd frequently get phone calls from people with budget machines who'd put in an extra CD drive / HDD / added a graphics card to replace the onboard one whose machines were freezing / blue-screening / doing other weird things.

Usually the problem was an over-stretched PSU. Most were rated as close to the wattage that the OEM components would draw as possible to keep costs down, so as soon as something new was added it would struggle to cope.

The usual disclaimer applies if replacing it with a higher rated one makes no difference to the problems you're having

**KevinS** · 10 June 2008, 14:30

Originally posted by DiscoStu View Post

The usual disclaimer applies if replacing it with a higher rated one makes no difference to the problems you're having

And if it doesn't fix the problem and you upgraded the motherboard/cpu/ram, you would have needed the uprated PSU anyway...

**lilelvis2000** · 10 June 2008, 14:37

Who knew.

I look at each component which rates their draw in amperage. And since I can't be bothered to add each one up...I never was good at spreadsheets.

For £140 I can get a dual-core bare bones system W/ 1Gig RAM & 400W PSU. I am debating whether I should stick with my current MB and PSU.

**~Craig~** · 10 June 2008, 14:42

Stick a 400W PSU in there and it will probably be ok. I would however steer away from the the very cheap PSU's as they tend to be noisy and carp quality.

Go for an Antec or Hi-Power.

**lilelvis2000** · 10 June 2008, 15:32

I've ordered a Antec EarthWatts 380W PSU...off Amazon £32.50 total...not bad. Apparently its 80% effecient.

Think about a new MB next. What I really need to do is upgrade the BIOS so the USb ports work with the KVM properly.

**meridian** · 10 June 2008, 17:20

Tagan tg480 u22

I've got one in my main machine, it's whisper quiet and supports dual PCIe graphics cards.

**lilelvis2000** · 17 June 2008, 20:36

Well that didn't fix the problem. In fact I managed to crash the OS twice today. I've put my RAID in the side burner for now..I'm using a CRON job to copy the data from one drive to the other overnight.

I think there is either a problem with my install (corrupt CD) or some other serious hardware issue. Crap SATA card, crap memory.

Will need to find time to test those someday...

**scooterscot** · 17 June 2008, 22:01

If you had an in line power meter with the mains I would bet the PC does not go near 200-Watts. I don't know where the idea comes from that PC's are power hungry. The maximum power required by my imac is 200w and don't forget that includes the monitor.

I suspect your failures are the result of software/hardware incompatibilities, clock times between boards. I've encountered system crashes in the past just because an IDE cable was longer than necessary, this error only occurred after software update albeit.

Powersupply big enough?