Hi folks.  Afraid I'm looking for a bit of spoonie help here.

 

I've started putting my first unraid server together primarily for use in as a domestic media server/backup system for an OS X based home.  I've upgraded the PSU that came with my case to a Corsair CX500 (as recommended by helpful people on this forum) I want to eventually run 12 2tb SATA drives in this machine, and the PSU only has 5 SATA connectors.  I've found some 1 male to 3 female connectors, and just wanted to check I can use a few of these to power all the drives.  As my limited understanding gathers, I have 500 watts to play with, and the 12 drives will consume a maximum of 36 watts each, with the mobo/processor sucking up another 60 watts.  Do I need to also add in power requirements for the 8 port sata card (AOC-SASLP-MV8), or the case fans, or am I good to go? at 492 Watts with the drives and Mobo, I'm just concerned I burn out the PSU if I haven't factored in everything else - I can always use green drives instead, though I doubt if they can handle streaming three HD movies to different machines at once.

 

Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

You should be fine with 12 GREEN drives on that supply.  I would not push it much more than that (15 would even be a little close for my liking). And yes the SATA power adapters are fine to use, just don't attach them all to one SATA lead from the PSU

Also, green drives should be fast enough to stream 3 HD movies at once.  Your network is far more of a bottleneck than the drive speed, so make sure your network is fully gigabit.

Thanks for the responses folks.  That's really helpful. 

Glad we could help!

Just an FYI, but green drives will be something like 9W each when working and maybe up to 24W when spinning-up the platter.

 

The only time you will see all the disks spin-up at once is during the initial power-on. A good power supply should be able to withstand it's rated power or even an overload for the short time during this spin-up.

 

I read here once that someone was running something like 15 or 16 drives off a Corsair 400W supply.

 

You'll be OK.

 

Peter