What PSU to use for a home server with many hard drives

Question

I have a home server with many uses, but its main use is to hold all the storage I need. The hardware is pretty old: an Intel mobo with a Core 2 6600 and a NVidia 7600GS, to which there are 6 drives attached:

• 1x small Hitachi Deskstar 140GB system drive (1)
• 2x WD Caviar Green 2TB EARX model (last year's models)
• 1x WD Caviar Green 2TB EZRX model (current "advanced format" model)
• 1x WD Caviar Green 3TB EZRX model
• 1x Toshiba 3TB drive

And this is all driven by a rather old 500W PSU.

Lately I've been getting some hardware errors from the drives: both EZRX drives are spewing hardware access errors into the logs, and today one of the EARX drive has started active up as well (2). I ran SMART self-tests on all drives, and they all came up clean, though the SMART logs for the problematic drive lists the errors that I've seen - which is why I believe the problem is not the actual drive hardware.

One of the suggestion was to upgrade the PSU. I bought a Cooler Master GXII 550W PSU. Is that enough or do I need more power?

(1) it has some bad sectors but its doing well enough and it still has around 100 or so spare sectors.

(2) errors look like this in dmesg:

ata9.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
ata9.00: irq_stat 0x40000001
ata9.00: failed command: READ DMA EXT
ata9.00: cmd 25/00:08:00:08:00/00:00:20:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 4096 in
       res 61/04:08:00:08:00/00:00:20:00:00/e0 Emask 0x1 (device error)
ata9.00: status: { DRDY DF ERR }
ata9.00: error: { ABRT }
ata9.00: failed to enable AA (error_mask=0x1)
ata9.00: failed to enable AA (error_mask=0x1)
ata9.00: configured for UDMA/133 (device error ignored)

Solution

You can use an online power estimator such as this one - plug in the values and it will give you a wattage recommendation. You should probably over spec a bit, especially if you play games (and thus fully utilize the CPU/GPU) on it as well has having this many drives connected.

Some further things to consider:

• Power supplies do wear out over time, an older power supply may not be as efficient or deliver quality power to components.

• You probably should look into getting a UPS or power conditioner of some sort to ensure your system has clean power.

• Make sure you are using quality SATA cables.

Comments

[ganesh]

Which PSU are you running currently? I am asking because a HDD does not draw much power (about 15-20 Watt at spin-up and 10 Watt at idle) and 6 drives alone should not cause any problems with a big 500 Watt PSU. PSU do fail over time though, so testing with another PSU would not hurt. But do test before you buy.

[Simon Melhuish]

Currently I'm using the brandless PSU that came with the beige box (though its no longer beige as I recently have moved the contents to a brand new Thermaltake enclosure). It has "JTC" on the label and no mfg date, though I expect it is 5 years old.

[Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007]

Your PSU does more than power your hard drive(s), so this depends on all the other devices you may or may not have in the system. Regardless, you already bought it so why not put it in and use it? When you try: Do they all power up and are accessible? Do they continue to be available and accessible while under heavy load? Then it's enough. If you hear actually trying to figure out the cause of the "hardware errors from the drives", then you're approaching it wrong.

[Ramhound]

A HDD with only 100 spare sectors and a bunch of bad sectors seriously needs to be replaced. We are unable to provide you product recomendations. The newer products I can guarantee you provide your system cleaner power compared to an unbranded 5 year old PSU. But at the end of the day unless you have better evidence the problem is the PSU its not worth the investment.

[MonkeyZeus]

You never mentioned which drive(s) are giving errors. I would try running getting S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics data from each HDD and see what is failing exactly. There are also several stress tests that you can run for each drive to see if any of them have any immediate issues which need to be addressed. Another idea would be to update your chipset and Sata drivers if newer ones are available. A Q6600 is quite the overkill for a storage server and is probably drawing more power than it's worth. I would go with a Core 2 Duo if possible but that is outside the scope of your question :)

[user1984103]

This question is off-topic because it's asking for hardware recommendations. You might however have a look at this power-supply calculator, which will help you gauge what size of a power supply you need for those components. (A 500W PSU looks to be more than adequate; almost double what I would have recommended. Plenty of growing room there if you upgrade things)

[ganesh]

For plain storage a Q6600 is overkill, but not if doing deduplication and or compression (E.g. via ZFS). But indeed out of the questions scope.

[Simon Melhuish]

@DarthAndroid: sorry for off-topic, this is the most on-topic stackexchange I found for this question. Your suggestion for the PSU calculator is the best advice so far, and if you'd given it as an answer, I'd choose it. According to the PSU calculator I need ~380W, so I should be fine.

[Simon Melhuish]

@MonkeyZeus: All the new Caviars (EZRX models) are giving me errors and today one of the older EARX drives has started erroring too. I ran SMART self-tests on all of these and the tests have all come up clean even though the SMART log shows errors (which is one reason I believe the problem is external to the drives).

[Simon Melhuish]

@Hennes, the server is running BTRFS on all drives - while not as power hungry as ZFS, I believe it requires more of its host then simple FATs.

[MonkeyZeus]

I wish I knew that before I commented :)...Just as a side-note though: I did not downvote but you should certainly include as much detail as necessary to avoid both downvotes and comments that assume things. If we know more then we are better able to make an informed comment and even be willing to post an answer :)

[Simon Melhuish]

I added more details regarding the problem.

[Michael Suelmann]

WD Caviar Greens only need 4-5 Watt. I have a home server with 12 disks and a 500W PSU. Typical consumption of the system is 100W. So unless your PSU is failing badly it's not the PSU. The internal SMART tests mostly are surface tests. Your problems could stem from failing electronics or bad/loose cables.

[Simon Melhuish]

SATA cables have a latch, which solves the loose cables problem :-) I've installed the new PSU and during that re-routed all the data cables and power cables (I've got this 4-in-1 power adapter for the data drives: amazon.com/Silverstone-Tek-Connectors-Stabilizing-CP06/dp/…)‌​.