After 3.5 years of operation, my Antec TruePower Quattro TP4-850 EC power supply died in machine HAL.
HAL is my storage server, it consists of this hardware:
- 16 Western Digital Caviar Black model WD2001FASS SATA HDDs (about 11 watt each)
- 1 3ware (now LSI) 9550SXU-16ML (PDF) PCI-X SATA RAID controller (about 10 watt)
- 1 Samsung SpinPoint P80 SP0842N PATA HDD (spinup about 25 watt, normally about 10 watt)
- 1 ASUS P5K WS motherboard with a PCI-X slot for the 3ware RAID controller (unknown watts)
- 1 Intel(R) CPU 2140 @ 1.60GHz (about 65 watt)
- 1 Club3D PCI Radeon HD4350 512MB 1xDVI/HDMI LP Videocard (about 30 watts)
- 4 sticks of 2 gigabyte DDR2-667 RAM modules (about 2 watt each)
It is organized as 2 RAID 5 arrays of 7 drives (each netting almost 11TB) each that are mirrored by a nightly job. 2 drives are hot spares. I could have done RAID 50 (now it is twice RAID 5), but this gives me the advantage of having a “yesterdays” view of the storage. Sometimes that is convenient :)
A separate (currently PATA!) disk contains the OS (currently Windows Server 2003), which will be upgraded to a SATA SSD running Windows Server 2008 later this year.
850 watts is perfectly OK, since the RAID drives don’t spin up all at once, and according to Extreme PSU Calculator Lite a 600 watt power supply should suffice.
Is it bad having the power supply to die? I think it is, especially in the way this one dies: it works for 10 minutes, then stops. The fan is still OK, so I don’t know why it dies.
Besides, my 2 Linux boxes both still run on an IBM PC 300PL Pentium 3 machines (that is, after replacing the capacitors a couple of years ago) and – though from 1999 – they run fine (and are about to be virtualized) without any power supply problems whatsoever.
Anyway: I have replaced it with a Corsair HX850W power supply, which is modulair too, and the Molex 8981 connectors are far easier to insert and retract than the Antec ones.
Being in picky mode today, I still have two tiny things on this new power supply:
- Though modular, I couldn’t use the Antec power cables to the hard drives: as the connectors at the PSU side are the same, but the pin layout differs.
- The Corsair HDD power cables for SATA and Molex 8981 aren’t colour coded (only black stripes)
–jeroen
PS: Having used HDDs since the mid-80s of last century, it is very nice to see how sizes have been coming down, and capacities going up.
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