Hard Drive Size vs. Power Supply

[cgonan]

I am trying to buy some large hard drives for older Dell systems (ie) Optiplex GX110, etc. I continue to be told by the sales folks at BestBuy and CompUSA that there may be a power supply issue with the legacy systems. I may be putting a large drive and a smaller boot drive in the same system, and I don't want to burn out the system or start a fire.

Can anyone spread some light on this?

Thanks

 

[edfair]

They are probably right. There MAY be a problem with the power supply in the legacy system. But you may find that there isn't a problem.
If it was one of mine I would try it. You generally don't kill systems and you don't get a fire. Your power supply craps out and quits. Not to say they never kill motherboards but I've seen more blown power supplies that didn't kill the motherboard than I've seen that did kill them.
But, if you start getting restarts or shutdowns it is a symptom of power problems and replacing the PS is pretty important.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[wooglin]

I thought that hard drives (except for the quick surge at start-up) were generally not large power draws - like 5-15 watts each?

 

[cdogg]

Older hard drives (post 1998) typically draw between 10-15 watts. Newer hard drives today, may take as much as 25 watts max.

cgonan,
I wouldn't be alarmed at all if you are only adding one drive to make a 2-drive PC. Only take caution if the PC is already drawing a lot of power from previous upgrades (high-powered video cards, lots of PCI devices, etc).

If it's an older system (PII, AMD K6-2, or older), make sure it has at least a 200w power supply before adding the drive. If it's newer, I wouldn't even give it a second thought since it was manufactured by Dell (they typically give plenty of headroom to add 2-3 devices).

~cdogg
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