PSU Wattage - Am i still in the safe zone with so much hardware?

[CatMilk]

I run a Seasonic GX-850 Prime PSU. System is running perfectly stable with all of the below hardware however im reaching a point of concern regarding pushing the PSU too far with more hardware upgrades. 

 

I have 3 x 4TB WD Purple drives i want to add into the machine. I've heard that drives typically sit around the 5-10 watt at standard load but can peak up to 20 watts during spin up and with so many drives in the machine it would be a 180 watt load on boot or under heavy load. I would appreciate a PC builders advice. 

 

This is whats currently on the machine:

• Ryzen 3900x
• 4 x 16GB DDR4
• Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero
• 2 x Samsung 970 Evo Plus NVME's
• 1 x WD Blue 1TB SSD
• 5 x WD Red 8TB HDD
• 1 x WD Purple 4TB HDD
• Nvidia 2070 Super GPU
• Nvidia T400 GPU (30w)
• 1 x PCIE USB 3.0 card (with a SATA-15pin power plugged into it)
• NZXT Kraken X53 Water Cooler
• 6 Case Fans (120-140mm)
• Nothing high powered running off the USB ports. Just keyboard & 3 x small USB dongles. 

 

 

 

[rippy4500]

the hard drives may use more power at boot, but it doesnt matter since the gpu and cpu are likely doing very little while booting except a small load on the cpu and boot drive, so its fine.

[Hybris5112]

If you upgrade the GPU's or move to a current gen processor then you really should upgrade the PSU. 1000w minimum but with 2 GPU's I would be tempted to move that minimum up to 1200w.

 

There is absolutely no excuse to abuse your equipment by running it within a inch of its life just because technically you are within or mostly within spec.

 

If I may ask what do you use this rig for? The rainbow of hard drive types and the T400 GPU strike me as more of a industrial or commercial use case.

[CatMilk]

3 hours ago, Hybris5112 said:

If you upgrade the GPU's or move to a current gen processor then you really should upgrade the PSU. 1000w minimum but with 2 GPU's I would be tempted to move that minimum up to 1200w.

 

There is absolutely no excuse to abuse your equipment by running it within a inch of its life just because technically you are within or mostly within spec.

 

If I may ask what do you use this rig for? The rainbow of hard drive types and the T400 GPU strike me as more of a industrial or commercial use case.

Good call, ill probably jump to a 1200w because my PC case can technically hold around 18 HDD's so no doubt it will be used in the future. I don't want to risk damaging so many components by cheaping out with a low wattage PSU. 

 

The rig is my Unraid server. It runs my gaming vm, home assistant vm, a few other vm's, a pile of docker containers for managing my media, cctv, unifi, adblock, backups, websites going out over nginx etc. The WD reds are for my media, the WD purples are for my CCTV, the WD blue is a slow cache drive, 1 of the NVME's is a rapid cache, the other is a dual boot Win10/Win11 for the gaming VM (with the 2070 super). The T400 if for transcoding and re-encoding media. 

[Guest]

No.  you're on the.....

No... Just kidding.   You're fine.