OT: How many internal IDE drives maximum off of an ATX power supply?

Lennart Sorensen lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
Fri Sep 21 14:34:05 UTC 2007


On Thu, Sep 20, 2007 at 12:57:57PM -0700, Salman Ahmed wrote:
> What's the maximum number of IDE (UltraDMA 100/133) drives that I can
> safely power from a ATX power supply (assuming that you have enough
> IDE/UDMA connectors of course)?
> 
> I have an old PIII system (Abit BH6) in an ATX case that currently has
> 3 UltraDMA 100/133 hard drives connected to a Promise UltraDMA 133
> controller card. And I am wondering if it's OK to add a 4th such HD in
> there without running into any power supply issues.
> 
> I am not sure what the wattage is of the power supply in the case but
> it is an ATX case. This system does not have an optical drive and the 3
> HDs connected to the Promise controller card are only ones in there
> presently.

Well the wattage of the power supply is rather important since that
pretty much will be answering your question.  Of course not all power
supplies are created equally, and the rest of the system takes power
too.

My personal desktop machine has:
700MHz Athlon
768MB ram
4 PATA drives (2 x 80GB maxtor, 1 x 250GB WD, 1 x 500GB WD)
1 DVD-ROM (pioneer)
1 CD-RW (plextor)
NV6600GT 128MB AGP card.

350W power supply of pretty decent quality (but not super great either).
Never had a problem.

Of course different brands and models of drives use different amounts of
power too.

--
Len Sorensen
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