I'm planning on turning my old AMD machine into a Linux fileserver. I cracked it open today just to take a look at some of the hardware. The thing that I was most interested in was whether or not the power supply and MOBO could handle 3 or 4 HDDs. Taking a look, I've got SATA connections enough to support the drives, but I'm concerned that the 510w PSU might be pushing it for that. Anyone have any opinions on this or maybe some references I could use to figure it out? Keep in mind that this is an old Athlon 64 cpu. I'm gonna take out one of the gfx cards and leave it with a single 6600gt. Also, it has an old SoundBlaster card.
How big are the hard drives? Larger drives use more power. Also depends on the combined current rating of your PSU on the +12v rails. If it's a no-name PSU, then it might be a problem. I was able to use 4 500GB hard drives with an Antec 480W PSU just fine. I even had a high end video card installed, and a quad core CPU.
It's a no-namer PSU (hence my concerns). Also, I'm looking to run on 1TB drives. I might get some 5400rpm drives since it's only gonna be a file server.
it should be fine, depending on what vid card you got and how much your cpu power takes. if, it's an ati card, you should be fine. if nvid, you may need to look harder.