Low wattage high effiecieny ATX PSU?

[Bitter]

I'm looking for something in the 250W range with platinum or titanium efficiency in a normal ATX size with a fairly standard set of cables attached to it. I'm assembling a home NAS from mostly spare parts at home but the one thing I don't have is a good quality highly efficient PSU. Seems most high efficiency units are either very high wattage and complete overkill, SFX units but still about double the needed wattage, or OEM units with proprietary cabling. I'd like to stay away from SFX because I understand they're a compromised design and I'm looking for long service life if it's going to be a 24x7 on device and that's also why I'd like to get some thing at the higher end or highest end of efficiency.

 

I'm considering the SeaSonic Prime Fanless PX-450 even though it's more wattage than I need, it's high efficiency and passive at least means there's not a fan to wear out or stuff it full of dust. Case will have some fans to move air so I'll try to set it up to force exhaust through the PSU so it gets some airflow cooling it even if it's warm case exhaust air if I do go with that unit. Any other suggestions?

[Somerandomtechyboi]

How about those pico psus? They are passively cooled so they should be decently efficient and theyre pretty cheap, there are 250w versions of those and i think upto 450-500w is available aswell

[Valkyrie Lenneth]

just get a 450watt psu thats good, at low wattage it wont make too much of a difference 50% / 80% is when it is giving the best efficiency, usually     basicly just get the SeaSonic Prime Fanless PX-450

[GuiltySpark_]

17 minutes ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

How about those pico psus? They are passively cooled so they should be decently efficient and theyre pretty cheap, there are 250w versions of those and i think upto 450-500w is available aswell

HDPlex has a new GaN model that'll do 250W. 

 

https://hdplex.com/hdplex-fanless-250w-gan-aio-atx-psu.html

[Somerandomtechyboi]

1 minute ago, GuiltySpark_ said:

HDPlex has a new GaN model that'll do 250W. 

 

https://hdplex.com/hdplex-fanless-250w-gan-aio-atx-psu.html

Though pricing is atrocious, how about the normal ones that cost ~20$? How efficient are those psus? I mean if theyre passive cooled w/o heatsink they gotta be pretty efficient

[LIGISTX]

31 minutes ago, Bitter said:

I'm looking for something in the 250W range with platinum or titanium efficiency in a normal ATX size with a fairly standard set of cables attached to it. I'm assembling a home NAS from mostly spare parts at home but the one thing I don't have is a good quality highly efficient PSU. Seems most high efficiency units are either very high wattage and complete overkill, SFX units but still about double the needed wattage, or OEM units with proprietary cabling. I'd like to stay away from SFX because I understand they're a compromised design and I'm looking for long service life if it's going to be a 24x7 on device and that's also why I'd like to get some thing at the higher end or highest end of efficiency.

 

I'm considering the SeaSonic Prime Fanless PX-450 even though it's more wattage than I need, it's high efficiency and passive at least means there's not a fan to wear out or stuff it full of dust. Case will have some fans to move air so I'll try to set it up to force exhaust through the PSU so it gets some airflow cooling it even if it's warm case exhaust air if I do go with that unit. Any other suggestions?

How many harddrives will you have? You need a decently large PSU depending on how many drives. 
 

Each drive “only uses” ~10 watts, but turning on a system with lots of drives is a huge instant load as you start to get the platters spinning. Low wattage units will struggle and could cause issues. But if it’s say 8 drives or less, it will be fine.  

[Bitter]

12 minutes ago, GuiltySpark_ said:

HDPlex has a new GaN model that'll do 250W. 

 

https://hdplex.com/hdplex-fanless-250w-gan-aio-atx-psu.html

I worry about how well that thing handles itself long term and how it handles spikes in demand not having many large capacitors in it. Most ATX PSU have around 130% OCP and can handle short stints into that range without long term harm, like a couple seconds spinning up drives at boot or waking drives from sleep.

6 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

How many harddrives will you have? You need a decently large PSU depending on how many drives. 
 

Each drive “only uses” ~10 watts, but turning on a system with lots of drives is a huge instant load as you start to get the platters spinning. Low wattage units will struggle and could cause issues. But if it’s say 8 drives or less, it will be fine.  

Currently, one drive and it's a Toshiba MG03ACA400, seems to spin up pretty slowly compared to other 7200 RPM desktop drives I've used. I don't have my amp clamp meter at home but I'll measure how much it takes at spin up next week. In the mean time check page 29 for some data on the drive power draw at spin up, it doesn't look too extreme? https://support.rm.com/_rmvirtual/media/downloads/1yy312_1yy647_1yy648_manual.pdf I'll probably grab another of the same drive at some point but I don't think I'll ever have more than 4 drives in a system. It's not so much for critical backup but for convenience. We share files around the house and dragging and dropping to a central location is easier and faster than uploading to cloud then downloading from cloud or walking around with a thumb drive to each PC I might want to have the data on or with. 

[LIGISTX]

18 minutes ago, Bitter said:

I worry about how well that thing handles itself long term and how it handles spikes in demand not having many large capacitors in it. Most ATX PSU have around 130% OCP and can handle short stints into that range without long term harm, like a couple seconds spinning up drives at boot or waking drives from sleep.

Currently, one drive and it's a Toshiba MG03ACA400, seems to spin up pretty slowly compared to other 7200 RPM desktop drives I've used. I don't have my amp clamp meter at home but I'll measure how much it takes at spin up next week. In the mean time check page 29 for some data on the drive power draw at spin up, it doesn't look too extreme? https://support.rm.com/_rmvirtual/media/downloads/1yy312_1yy647_1yy648_manual.pdf I'll probably grab another of the same drive at some point but I don't think I'll ever have more than 4 drives in a system. It's not so much for critical backup but for convenience. We share files around the house and dragging and dropping to a central location is easier and faster than uploading to cloud then downloading from cloud or walking around with a thumb drive to each PC I might want to have the data on or with. 

A handful of drives will be no issue at all. Things turn into an issue when you have 20+ drives trying to spin up at once.

[--SID--]

Cooler Master V-series V550 V2 Gold is highly efficient at low loads, dead silent up to 250w and much cheaper than the Seasonic Fanless thing.

[Bitter]

3 hours ago, --SID-- said:

Cooler Master V-series V550 V2 Gold is highly efficient at low loads, dead silent up to 250w and much cheaper than the Seasonic Fanless thing.

I'll consider that too.  Thanks.

[Bitter]

8 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

A handful of drives will be no issue at all. Things turn into an issue when you have 20+ drives trying to spin up at once.

Oh lord no not getting that crazy, I'd need 10GBe network stuff for that and those switches and cards are too expensive and several of the PC's here don't have the space to install a NIC. Gigabit is a little slow but it's faster than Wifi and more consistent with close neighbors blasting their own Wifi around the area. I'm just running OpenMediaVault since it's easy to use for me and I've got an old Asus board with a Haswell G1820 that'll run passively cooled since I delidded and put better paste inside, plenty of power with fairly minor power draw and in the future if I do need 10GBe in the house I'll have a free x16 3.0 slot for that and can chuck in a cheap Haswell i5 S or T CPU with 4 cores to handle the demand. Board only has 4 SATA ports and only 2 are 6G ports so I can't get too crazy.

[LIGISTX]

8 hours ago, Bitter said:

Oh lord no not getting that crazy, I'd need 10GBe network stuff for that and those switches and cards are too expensive and several of the PC's here don't have the space to install a NIC. Gigabit is a little slow but it's faster than Wifi and more consistent with close neighbors blasting their own Wifi around the area. I'm just running OpenMediaVault since it's easy to use for me and I've got an old Asus board with a Haswell G1820 that'll run passively cooled since I delidded and put better paste inside, plenty of power with fairly minor power draw and in the future if I do need 10GBe in the house I'll have a free x16 3.0 slot for that and can chuck in a cheap Haswell i5 S or T CPU with 4 cores to handle the demand. Board only has 4 SATA ports and only 2 are 6G ports so I can't get too crazy.

Networking speed doesn’t have anything to do with capacity. Obviously more drives does typically mean more potential bandwidth, but I run 10x4 tb drives in my homelab on gigabit, and my buddy runs 24x8 TB also on gigabit. More drives in our case just allows for more storage.

[Bitter]

4 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

Networking speed doesn’t have anything to do with capacity. Obviously more drives does typically mean more potential bandwidth, but I run 10x4 tb drives in my homelab on gigabit, and my buddy runs 24x8 TB also on gigabit. More drives in our case just allows for more storage.

I meant that if I had such a large array then 1Gb network would be terribly slow because I'd likely be putting a lot more data on/off the array, if that makes sense?

[LIGISTX]

3 hours ago, Bitter said:

I meant that if I had such a large array then 1Gb network would be terribly slow because I'd likely be putting a lot more data on/off the array, if that makes sense?

Just depends what the array is used for. I don’t actively use much of the data on my NAS. I just have a lot of photo content being an a mature photographer and don’t delete anything, lol. 

[Bitter]

41 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

Just depends what the array is used for. I don’t actively use much of the data on my NAS. I just have a lot of photo content being an a mature photographer and don’t delete anything, lol. 

I'm looking for it to be a drag n drop share point amongst PC's in the house so I don't have to download the same things every time or find the right USB stick or so she doesn't upload to cloud for me to download from cloud which is a bit silly when we're on the same network in the same house. 

[LIGISTX]

25 minutes ago, Bitter said:

I'm looking for it to be a drag n drop share point amongst PC's in the house so I don't have to download the same things every time or find the right USB stick or so she doesn't upload to cloud for me to download from cloud which is a bit silly when we're on the same network in the same house. 

Ya I totally get it. I just mean network speed has little to do with amount of storage.

 

But seeing as you will have not many drives, a 450 watt is fine. 
 

Also, you could just throw a few drives in your PC and network share them. 

[Bitter]

32 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

Ya I totally get it. I just mean network speed has little to do with amount of storage.

 

But seeing as you will have not many drives, a 450 watt is fine. 
 

Also, you could just throw a few drives in your PC and network share them. 

My PC is a power hog, even just at idle. I'd rather repurpose something unused and lower power that can sit in the cool basement where drive noise doesn't matter.

[jabuzzard]

This is what I did to power my self build home NAS server. It does however requires a fair bit of DIY, but IMHO the final result is superior and worth the effort. First off you need an ATX PSU, any PSU will do, a dead one will work just fine. I hunted down a PS3 ATX PSU for the shorter 100mm depth. Next step is to open it up and gut it, just keeping the mains leads (cut them as close to the board as possible) and then give the case a good clean. You then use a bit of FR4 PCB and cut something the same shape as the PCB from the PSU and mount in in the PSU. You then source a 24V DC output 4"x2" open frame PSU of your choice, and mount it onto the FR4 using some stand off headers. This is used to power a HDPLEX 200W plug in PSU. Make custom wiring cables to suite your case design. For a final trick fit a new fan to the PSU and then feed it back to the main board and power it off a chassis fan header. That way you can monitor your PSU fan to get notified of failures. 

 

I used this PSU earlier in the year but is now out of stock at RS in the UK, but there are loads of other options.

 

https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/switching-power-supplies/1227637

 

A big plus of this route is you loose all the bulk of the cabling from the PSU to the ATX motherboard for improved airflow. The 4"x2" PSU's can be had at >90% efficiency and are a fairly standard footprint so not to problematic to replace down the line should it fail. Though typically the PSU's have extended availability so you can just drop in a replacement. Worst case scenario is that the replacement PSU has different connectors so would need to replace them.

 

If you don't need 200W then could use a 160W picoPSU with a suitable 12V 4"x2" open frame PSU instead. In general the pins for a complete custom wiring harness can be made with some practice using a pair of small pliers and then held good and firm with a dab of solder. Alternatively get a cheap Chinese crimp tool off Amazon. There are some picoPSU type power supplies from China that offer 300W and more outputs, I am a bit sceptical off how good they will be. That said they tend to need a regulated 12V PSU so are just passing the 12V through. If you go to a 3"x5" open frame PSU (which will still easily fit inside the enclosure of an ATX PSU) you should be able to get a suitable PSU. A 4"x2" open frame PSU will also happily fit in an SFX PSU enclosure.

 

Final note my motherboard seems to sequentially spin up the hard drives, and most do these days in my experience.