I bought an IDE controller card that can handle up to 4 additional HDD's. Unfortunately, I don't have that many power feeds from my PSU, BUT, I have an extra 200 watt PSU with multiple power feeds.

Can I plug in the lone PSU near the tower, and use it to power the extra HDD's that are on the IDE controller card???

Thanks........................
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Thanks goldfish.

The on-board PSU is a low-powered dell unit.

Butsince I'm not askin' about fans, rather about HDD's......

If you could define 'low-power device, ...

Wow. I got more questions now than I did before you responded

 

Good info win2k.

Is the additional heat get generated on the board in the mappin' process? Or by the HDD's themselves?

If the latter, then placement of the HDD's outside the tower, with longer IDE cables will facilitate a solution???

EDIT:
I'm readin' now that this will NOT work, unless a jumper wire is used to simulate a load on the PSU?

Is this correct? Which 2? I know this is important too...


RE-Edit...

still wonderin'...
anybody?

Found in another forum the [a] jump technique, with a paper clip.

And a responder who said this is a way to use a second power supply. Bingo.

BUT, this thing has no power switch on the back of the unit, so additional jumpers are necessary???

Anybody know which ones?

 

Hadn't thought of sync'in' the PSU's.

I already got a couple of enclosures; I'm runnin' out of wall outlets in the neighborhood.

Problem solved - all I need is some butter, cause the PSU is toast. Or I just toasted it.

Soirrty abouy thr spellunhg errots - it"s haerd tp see the keytboared thruuu the smoke.



anyway, it wasn't THEM two...


EDIT:
Don't know which wires they were, but I think I saw some 2s 2, and a couple of the 2p 6 orbitals escape their respective valence orbital levels, and go whizzin' by. MAN they're fast, I couldn't tell WHAT shell they were from.

Anyway, when stuff stopped glowin', I went with goldfish's trick - splicin' onto a molex connector another connector.

What IS the half-life of a toasted PSU, anyway?

 

I googled "atx power supply connector pinout" and came up with a couple of sites that showed the connector pins:
http://wiki.xtronics.com/index.php/ATX_Pinout
http://www.powerstream.com/itx-atx-pinout.htm

A word of caution though, some power supplies require a minimum load operate correctly. That is, if there is nothing connected to the 3.3v and 5v lines they may blow up. Also note that pin 11 may be a 3.3v sense line. It will need to be connected to one of the other 3.3v lines or the power supply will think that the 3.3v output is low and keep trying to increase the output. You may say "well I don't care about the 3.3v since the hard drives only use 5v and 12v", but allowing it to be open may cause the smoke to escape. And we all know that electronics run on smoke. If you let the smoke out, it doesn't work anymore.

Another thing that you need to consider is ground. The two different power supply grounds will need to be tied together at some point close to the power supplies. Otherwise they can float apart and you end up with a voltage differential.

An option to using an external power supply is to just get splitters for the HDD power connectors. you can buy them or make them by cutting them off of other supplies. You have to be careful with this though because the power supply might not be large enough to support that many extra loads. This will also cause the smoke to escape.

Good luck.

 

That was funny...

 

Sooo...... what?

Don't paper clips make good rectifiers?

 

Was too! Uh-huh!