Heeter

Hi Guys,

Can a power supply degrade over time? I have five hard drives in this one tower and several fans, and now I seem to be having trouble creating RAID sets from the same HD's. The more that I uplug, the faster the bootup. It is a noname 300watt. Can a bad Power supply damage HD's?

Thanks in advance,

Heeter

j79zlr

Shouldn't damage them, but 300W especially from a noname brand is pretty low. I would be safe to say that a 350W Antec is probably better than a 550W that came with a $30 case

If this is on the PC that is in your sig I would upgrade to a 400W+ or better decent PS.

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Heeter

Thanks, J79ZLR,

No, this one is for my Home File Server tower. It has 7 HD's and several fans. It is a PIII733, underclocked to 600mghz. It has gotten by since the summer with this PS, but since yesterday nothing seems to want to work properly. LOLOL 550Watt, you're funny,J.

The PC that is mentioned in my sig has an Antec425Watt

Heeter

FishBoy

im using a 480w antec psu and i dont have any power problems, 3hd, 5fans, amd64, and the vga takes power too and it's all good and it wasn't expensive either, somwhere between 100 and 150 canadian dollar

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Elektro Slime

just get a generic 460 watt psu for about $40, just make sure it has enough current on the 12v line......

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Zedric

No, PSU don't generally degrade. They can break, sure, but they don't really degrade over time.

I didn't really get the problem. You can't make a RAID array? What's that got to do with the PSU?? :confused:

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Heeter

Well, Zedric,

Everything about the tower seems to be not working at the same time. Things like formatting RAIDed drives don't complete, computer actually seizing up and forced to manually shutoff and reboot. The more stuff I unplug, the better it is working. So far, I have unplugged 3 HD's and 4 fans and it is holding up. Up until four days ago everything was purring like a kitten. I don't think that I could have three HD's fail on me at the same time. I am getting my extra old tower back today from a friend's place to test these HD's independant of each other. So, I am thinking that it just might be what is powering everything. I am actually at a loss, I mean, what are the chances of three of my seven HD's failing at the same time (two from the same mirror RAID, and one from the another mirror RAID). I am hopeing that I could chalk this up to a my 300watt noname PSU, at least that what is printed on the label, 300watts.

Heeter

Zedric

I'm not saying it's not the PSU, it even sounds likely that it is. It might have broken in some weird half way. That happens too.

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FishBoy

460watt yea but not just any unnamed brand, coz it all also depend on how the wirring is inside the power supply, antec is good 460watt, make sure not to just pick out any 460watt. well first let's work on getting you a 4ghz

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Heeter

I have tested the 3 HD's that I removed from my File Server tower on another machine and they work fine. But when I put them back in to the Server tower with the remaining HD's, Tower does not even boot up properly. I tried a different RAID card as well with the same effect. I really do need the drives Mirrored as the info on them is so vital. I think that I will continue to assume that the PSU has degraded to the point that it cannot support the HD's like it used to. I will be purchasing another one.

Heeter

Maveric169

When it comes to power you can never have too much, but remember to stay away from generic no-name. I got a 300W no name with my case also, I sold it on ebay threw a few more bucks with it and got a 480W Antec.

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