How many HDDs on a Corsair 520W?
My file server is powered by a Corsair 520HX and the PSU is a few months short of a year old. I'm running five or six HDDs currently, and I've got a 1.5TB waiting to be installed.
One hard drive is found when Windows starts up, but as soon as I try accessing it it disappears completely. It's the only piece of hardware drawing power off of that cable. Western Digital's SMART utility shows no problems. I haven't added or removed hardware in months, this just started happening after I installed Windows 7. I've checked the connections on all of the hardware in the tower.
I'm at work now so I can't try a different cable or check which rail it's on, but I thought I'd start checking with the Goodjer hive mind. 
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There is a maximum number of devices you can have installed on one computer, at one time(It was like 20 or 21 in XP). Usually people find this out with too many USB devices, not hard discs. Devices include hard discs, input devices, MP3 players, smartphones, network cards, etc. See what installed hardware you do not use, uninstall it and see if that helps
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Do you have a link KingGorilla? That's the first I've heard of something like that and I'd like to read up on it.
As for hard drives, for a file server 6 hard drives doesn't sound like it should be maxing out 520W, especially if the PC doesn't have any powerful CPU or graphics card in there. The only suggestion I would have is to check if the BIOS for the motherboard can handle a drive that big, some old ones can't so you might need an update.
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I think KG may be confusing 'number of drive letters' with 'number of devices'.
There's no real logical limit anymore to how many devices you attach to a computer. You can hook up hundreds of hard drives via something like Fibre Channel. You just have to group them into few enough filesystems to fit into available drive letters, or mount them as subdirectories off your main filesystem, like Unix.
Crispy: An individual hard drive will usually pull about 1A each from the 5v and 12v rails, although you'll have to look up your specific models to be sure. You might want to look at the specs on your supply.... I'm thinking the 5v supply might be overtaxed. The Corsairs I've looked at (a 650 and an 850) don't have that much juice on the 5v rail... it's all loaded into the 12v supply for the video card. There's essentially no difference in terms of 5v supply between the two models.
The HXes are also multi-rail. Look at the specs on the supply. If it mentions more than 1 +5V rail, you may have half the supply overloaded... if you redistribute the load more evenly among the plugs, you MIGHT be able to bring it up. That may not work; the internal split might be one rail to the motherboard, and the other rail to all the drives.
Basically, you'll need to do some simple math, to figure out what your 5V and 12V demands are, and then figure out if the supply is adequate.
You may need a "server" supply; those tend to have a lot more 5V power.
Staats wrote:
Thanks gentlemen, I'll keep you updated.
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