Power supply

[Bozo]

Today I retired a computer at work that has been running since 2003. It has been upgraded sporatically over the years with new hard drives and NICs.
In it's final configuration it had: 7 SATA hard drives, 2-3Ware RAID controllers in JBOD, 2 NICs, a CD/DVD burner, and 4-80mm fans. All attached to an Intel D865GBF motherboard with a 3GHz Pentium 4 and 3GB of RAM. It also had a HP scanner, a USB CD/DVD label maker, and a 2 port USB toaster attached to it with 1 SATA drive installed. This computer ran 24/7/365 and was very busy. It had 36 schedualed task with a task running on average every 6 minutes, with up 4 task running at the same time, plus other computers connecting to it from around our facility. About 98% of the task were reading or writting to one of the hard drives.
All this on an Antec 430W power supply.

Amazing!

 

[MaxBurn]

Using on board video? I don't see anything strange here.

 

[Bozo]

When I ran all the parts through the Antec power supply calculator, it came up as minimum 422W. And when you factor in the capacitor aging it jumps to 469W minimum.
I'm just surprised it lasted this long, considering it was being run at ~90% capacity.

 

[CougTek]

I'm pretty sure that if you would plug the system in a power meter, you would not see it taking much more than 300W. It still is good that it lasted 8 years. Not a bad unit for sure.

 

[time]

Even 300W is unlikely; I'd guess it would have spent most of its time at maybe 60% load, peaking at not much more than 300W. If 98% of the tasks were reading and writing to disk, then CPU usage would be modest, and 4 tasks at once just means more I/O waits.

But 8 years plus @24x7 from a power supply is indisputably excellent. It's not hard to see why Bozo swears by Antec.

Bozo, their calculator is designed to encourage customers to buy more expensive units than they actually need. There's a very real conflict of interest. And when did this capacitors out of tolerance crap start getting currency? If it was going to affect say, ripple, why would a higher-rated PSU help? Manufacturers under-rate their units already, in some cases by heaps, but that's not part of any calculator.

 

[Howell]

Pretty impressive to just keep chugging along. As I made my rounds last month upgrading switch firmware I discovered one in the computer room that had an UPTIME of over 1700 days. I didn't have the heart to upgrade it.