1Tbyte drive - PSU wattage?

chunter

I notice that some DVRs haven't got the power to drive the newer big hard drives.

Just wondering if there's a scale (or formula) to what size (wattage) of PSU would be standard for these monsters of hard drives.

exup

I would try to go for the best you can afford. as some makes vary in price for the same wattage - But I would say with a 1TB drive you would be looking at some meaty add on peripherals as well - such as maybe a sound card and gfx card.

I wouldnt go anything lower than a 500 W at the minimum - I'm running a 650W with twin 200GB HDD but I have other things sucking up the power too. I had a 350W spare on while I had to repair the 650 fan, and it wasnt powerful enough for the hard drive and caused errors

savemoney

I just upgraded last week to a TB spinright Samsung 1tb along with 500gb HD (from old pc) and two dvdr (1 from old pc)

I also got the Nvidia gtx260 graphics.

I went for a 620W Corsair module psu for all that but could get away with a 500w model

The new pc is very quiet as I opted for quite psu, case (2 large case fans, Antec P182 case) etc, you can hardly here it

chunter

Thanks for the replies folks. It's an area which I think is under-emphasised.

shadowdragon

chunter wrote: »

Thanks for the replies folks. It's an area which I think is under-emphasised.

I agree, its always been an issue that people seem to miss the concept of. The more wattage the stabler(spelling!) the system, the first time I remember it being an issue was with the intruduction of the athlon processers around the time when P2s were popular. You needed a 300w min PSU (if I remember correctly(or was it 350w!!))

sweetnskint

the technology today uses a lot more wattage you should get at least 500w with modern computers but really think higher the better.i have 650w for mine beacause have a lot to power off it.

vibrantcolour

I think people have misread the original post!!

He/she's after a hard drive for his DVR not his/her pc.

fwor

It's not clear that the advice being given on HDD power requirements is correct either.

The fact that a drive can store more data doesn't necessarily mean that it needs more power.

Having done a very brief look at the specs of a terabyte drive (a Hitachi), the idle power consumption is stated as less than 10W, and during read/write activity that only rises to under 15W. Compare this with a 400Gb Hitachi drive produced 3 years ago and there is hardly any difference.

I've not looked at specific start-up power consumption figures for the latest drives - this being where the drive is at its most power-hungry - but I would guess that this is more dependent on spin speed and other factors than purely on the drive's capacity.

aliEnRIK

Thats EXACTLY what I was thinking. Just cos a drives bigger doesnt mean it needs more power! (Or possibly a LITTLE more power but hardly significant)