Thought I would post some links to power supply calculators.

If anyone has others, feel free to add.

 

http://www.extreme.outervision.com/psucalculator.jsp

 

http://educations.newegg.com/tool/psucalc/index.html

 

http://www.corsair.com/psufinder/default.aspx

 

Corsair's is definitely more "marketing" driven as it does not calculate wattage but returns the corsair psu's that should fit your entered requirements.

Here's an old one, too out-of-date to be very useful, but does still have some 'educational' value.  You have to manually calculate an adjusted wattage for more than 4 drives.

 

http://www.journeysystems.com/?powercalc

 

There is some value in trying all of these, to get a better feel for what you really need, rather than trusting any one vendor's advice.  I must say I liked the Corsair choices, and the Newegg value seemed very good, conservative.  The eXtreme Outervision one seemed low, but more detailed.

 

The eXtreme Outervision one seemed low, but more detailed.

 

I've found that with peripherals, we tend to oversize power supplies.

 

My opinion was that the Outervision was pretty accurate, but did not cushion the environment for large amount of growth.

 

In each of my manual estimated calculations, The outervision was close to what I calculated, albeit, more accurate.

 

 

The problem with some of these online calculators is that they are meant for typical PC's, or maybe gaming PC's.  Our servers require pretty much nothing but gobs and gobs of 12V current that isn't limited to just supplying the mobo/CPU.  That makes PSU selection a little trickier than an online calculator that just adds up the watts.  The CPU's required to run most unRAID servers is barely even a rounding error compared with the 12V necessary to power the drives.  It looked like the "Pro" version of Outervision one would work, but the NewEgg one is useless for our purposes, since all it spits back is a wattage number.

 

SirWired