[charlie0440]

So my current NAS case (Antec 300) is finally maxed out with hard drives. I think its 11 now, they are mostly 2TB samsung f4's or 2TB seagate drives, plus 1 SSD for the OS:



This has lead me to upgrade of the case. I bought a Fractal Design Define XL today (impulse buy, someone was selling one virtually brand new for £60 on ebay, I couldn't help mysef ). I already have a Startech 4in3 hot swap bay in my Antec so I should be able to get 15 bays out of this new case, maybe 16 one day if I swapped it for a 5in3.

I'm currently running it as a Ubuntu server (specs in signature), its has a SAS card and a dual tuner DVB-S2 card.

Questions:
1) is my PSU (Antec TP-650) beefy enough to handle all 15 drives plus pcie cards?
I've not run in to any problems yet with 11 drives. It is a multi-rail PSU but I'm not currently running the drives as RAID.

2) Further down the line I plan to get a new ATX mobo & cpu (with lots of PCIe slots and which will support vt-d) for my server. I will then want to cram in a couple of gt430 or similar and turn it into a XEN or ESXI box with multiple hosts/OS's. One of which will be a (the current) Unbuntu server (NAS) sharing all the hard drives as a couple of ZFS mounts.

Again would my current PSU be up to the task, if not any recommendations?

Just want to find out now as their is no point swapping the cases over to find swap out the PSU a few weeks later. Damn XBMC for being such an expensive hobby

Thanks in advance

[Dougie Fresh]

You can get an idea of how close you are to maxing out that 650W PSU by getting a Kill-a-Watt and measuring your current power consumption. You can then extrapolate from there. That's where I would start.

[Beer40oz]

For unRAID a single rail PSU is recommended...

I love the Antec Neo Eco....

Antec NEO ECO 620C 620W
- Plus certified
- doesn't come with a power cable
- 48A, supports up to 22 green drives or 14 7200 rpm drives
- recommended for larger servers, 10 - 22 drives

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.p...ic=12219.0

Nice choice on your new case... very nice quality the Fractal... I own the little brother....

Now for Unbuntu... I have no clue what the requirements are....

[oRAirwolf]

http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp

This calculator is an invaluable tool and will tell you how much wattage you need. People grossly overestimate their PSU requirements. You can put in all your current specs and your future specs (including gpu's and pci e cards). The pro version will even tell you the loads on the individual rails if you want to know.

With the following specs:

1 CPU
High end mobo
Intel e5200
2xddr3 ram
basic video card
16 x standard sata hdd
1 x flash ssd
cable tv tuner
1 pci e 1x card
4 x 120mm regular fans

I came up with:
Minimum PSU 322w
Recommended PSU 372w

I think you are fine

[Jetster]

Your not even close to max

[charlie0440]

Your not even close to max

Thats good to know. I wasn't so much worried about making out the 650W, but was not sure about how close to overloading a rail I might be