Jam (Response Number 5) I want to have 10 or at least 9 them connected at a time. That ought not be a problem since i have 6 ide ports. (the 6.2 gb im going to drop sooner og later)

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psu 200W #1 is overloaded. There is about 80W of 12V power on that psu and each HD takes 25W of 12V power. See post #3. The problem you face with the multiple supplies is the 12v rail. When you go from a 200W psu to 400W psu they do not just double each output (3.3v, 5v, 12v, etc), they put much of the increase into the 12V rail because it is understood that hard drives, vid cards, and cpus (the main power consumers in high power systems) are run primarily off the 12V rail. So by using multiple small supplies that total 850W what you really have there is a few hundred watts of 3.3v and 5v power going to waste. There is really no way to know if a given psu is rated above its actual output. Psus vary even within the same brand and model number. I would go with your current plan of getting a huge one (like 600W) that is a good deal. You might still need one of those extra psus though. And check the 12v rail rating of the psu before you buy it. Some 600W psus might give you 30A and others 35A. You want as much amperage as possible at 12V.

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#8 Thanks a lot; that was a very good answer. Now i have something to look for

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Should this be ok? It seens it delivers only 24 A on the 12V channel. But if I supply with my 300W PSU, then it ought to be OK, or what? Model No: TAX600P Specifications: - 115VAC ~ 9A @ 60 Hz - 230VAC ~ 4.5A @ 50 Hz - +5V @ 41A - +12V @ 24A - +3.3V @ 28A - -5V @ 0.5A - -12V @ 0.8A - +5Vsb @ 2A

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sounds good to me

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COOL! You have been a very great help, thank you johnoh!

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I'm still curious as to why you're doing this...do you actually need all that storage space...or is it just to see what you can make work?

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I do music and record it in up to 8 channels of 24bit/96khz. When recording and editing i was adviced to use 32bit float 'resolution' (8 empty bits). So recordings are very space consuming. Then i use RAID so 4x120 gives me one drive at 240 GB. The fifth i regard as so called 'hot spare' so that if one of the disks in the array goes down. When this happens i would like to 'mirror' one 80gb disk with the other (soft raid 1) so that i dont have to go through hours and hours of data recovery when a disk goes down. This gives me around half of the storage space that i bought, but time saving and safe. Then i must admit too that i am a bit lazy and dont like to do backups on cd. So ok I COULD do with less, but it is VERY nice to be able to have a some projects in the computer that you work on only onece in a while and not having to finish them before you do the next one. Another argument is that when building my array the 120 gb maxtor was the best price/space tradeoff. 80gb would have done just fine i guess... A secret is i also have an ever-growing collection of mp3s (40 gigs for the moment) :)

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Sune, I would definitely suggest the highest watt PSU you can use if you are looking to RAID a number of drives together. Another thing that has caused this kind of behavior for me (my clients) has been loose Molex connectors. The power connector to the hard drives could have loose wires and may be causing a reset on one or more of the hard drives. borelli34

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Thanks borelli34 I will check those. Now i will also add one more old PSU, until i get the new one...

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Ok! Now i added one more 200W PSU and the clicking noises seems to be gone. But now i realize that my sound card is not recognized by bios (or whatever makes the IRQ-list at startup). I dont remember when i last used it so it could have been gone for a couple of days.... I removed one motherboard fan so the 300W-PSU only supplies motherboard, cpu+fan, 3xPC1, 1xAGP, 2xSDRam. But still my sound card is gone. Could it have been damaged? Is there anything i can do to try to reestablish contact? Now I set it up this way (and ordered this 600W PSU): 300W: Mobo(cpu+fan, 3xPC1, 1xAGP, 2xSDRam) 200W #1: 3 HDs 200W #2: Diskette, DVD, CDR 200W #3: 3 HDs 150W: All fans, 2 Hds

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Try the sound card in different slots. If your mobo has sound on board and you had it disabled to install the sound card, you may have reset the bios somewhere here in the last couple days and it got re-eneabled, and it is now conflicting with the pci sound card, so you'll want to disable it again. More likely you have an irq conflict and moving the card to a different slot will help.

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Phew! I checked the BIOS and it han not been reset. The onboard devices was still disabled. Already a long time ago i have found the only slot where the sound card does not share with anything else. But computers ARE strange: I put the sound card into another PCI slot and booted. The device listing contained my sound card. Then i turned the computer off, put it back to its original slot, booted and now everything seems to work as it should! Anyway i look forward to getting my new PSU. Right now it feels like my computer is a whole factory with no less than 5 power-buttons ;-) And who knows what will be its next move... I really appreciate your help; Thank you very much!

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A little follow up: My system have been stable now for a couple of days, and drives are not disappearing anymore. Of couse i would like to add 2 more HDs, but that will have to wait until i get my new 600w PSU and i also ordered a PSU for my external soundcard box. Think i will let the old one drive the motherboard and eventually one HD and then put all the HDs/cd/cdrw/etc. on the new one.

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