On Wednesday 15 March 2006 03:51, Frank Hart wrote: > On Tue, Mar 14, 2006 at 03:22:03PM -0800, Andrew Sharp wrote: > > > Perhaps your power supply is defective and not providing steady > > > power, > > > or isn't happy with the load that is on it. I have seen quite a few > > > systems that were unstable and had disk issues and crashed, where the > > > problem disappeared once a quality power supply was installed. > > > > True enough. If you had a power spike, anything connected to power > > could be now suspect. PS on down. > > > > I didn't read where you checked your disk cables. I've had more than a > > couple of cables of various sorts just suddenly go bad for no reason. > > Ok, I've replaced the Fortron 400W PS with an Enermax 350W and it all > seems stable again. All drives are recognized and the mirror is synced > again. 350W should be enough for an Athlon 3400 and 3 disks, should it? A quick google search comes up with this page(1) which if it is the Fortron you were using says it only has 15a on the +12v. This is really not enough amperage to allow a heavy draw of power for an AMD64 system. I have an Enermax 350 (EG365P-VE) in my Socket 754 machine it has 26a on the +12v which is more than the recommended minimum I see most places of 24a, it works well but I only have a video card, one hard drive in the machine. You may want to give the power supply calculator linked on this page(2) a try and see what it says. > I havent't checked the cables but it would seem strange that all three > cables became bad all of a sudden. > > Now my theory is: > - the PS became bad after a power spike or some other reason witch > affected the MB and hard drives. I don't think the PS was underpowered > because the configuration hasn't changed since the installation. Mine is you were lucky so far and the draw on the power supply has finally made it unstable/started to kill it off. > Is it possible that a defective PS could damage other hardware? I > replaced all disks and the mobo since the first failures but I hope that > the recent instablility was all caused by the PS and that I don't have > to replace the rest for a second time. A bad power supply is one of the most common reasons for hardware failures hopefully it has not damaged the pieces and you may be able to reuse all that hardware you have laying around now in another machine. BTW you may want to get something along the lines of a 450+w with at least 24a on the +12v line just to be certain you do not draw too much from the 350w you have put in. > Frank > > -- > gpg: FBB8E53A > jabber: hart@opensystems.nl Stephen (1) http://www.directron.com/fsp40060pfn.html (2) http://extreme.outervision.com/index.jsp -- GPG Pubic Key: http://users.eastlink.ca/~stephencormier/publickey.asc
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