Power Consumption for CD drives

[waagghh]

Hey guys,

 

I have an odd question here. My company is working on building a 1 to 8 CD duplicator tower. Simple stuff really, basically composed of 9 CD bays (something like plextor or Asus 52x cd-rw drives), 1 controller unit, and a few fans for the case. We drop in the master CD and load the other 8 bays, they all spindle up and duplicate the CD at the same time. What size PSU would I need for that? I doubt that this needs a OCZ 600W psu, however Im not sure what type of power draw 9 drives all working at once would consume. Just so everyone understands, this is only powering the 9bays, 2 or 3 120mm low noise fans, and the actual controller unit. There is no CPU, RAM, HD etc, the controller unit has a small LCD and all controls are done there.

 

Anyone have any thoughts on the size PSU?

thx

 

One more thing, anyone know of a good place to get a large tower machine for a decent price? Need something with 10x 5.25 bays for the drives and controller. All i'm finding at the moment is the thermaltake armor case...

 

edit* Keep in mind that this thing will be running for hours on end so it needs some stable power. If we're burning 1000 CD's for a customer @ around 3min a set of 8x, this guy will be running for almost a full 8 hour day burning.

[karl pell]

This is a trick question, right?

 

Why else wouldn't you look at the label of your candidate CD burner for electrons required and multiply by 9 and throw some more in for good measure?

[waagghh]

For a few reasons =)

 

- Because I'm at work and dont have one in my hand. Newegg, and plextors sites also dont tell me anything more than that it uses the +5v line and +12v line.

- Because when you normally build a computer you add up your basic draws and then increase it by a variable amount to deal with upstart fluctuations. Was wondering if the same deal is needed here. I imagine the extra that you add is to make sure your within specs and to deal with upstart power spikes that hit when a drive first starts up. If someone knows for example that the CD bays normally spike upto 100% then I could guess a PSU range. I'd rather not purchase a 200$ PSU on my jobs dollar if I dont have to, but by the same token dont want to have a spotty psu that generates bad burns due to insufficient power.

[karl pell]

-I've got a Plex712A(IDE) at home that I can pull label numbers from tonight if you're interested

-I suspect that you're going to have a difficult time evaluating transients (power-up, spin-up) ... that info is not commonly, reliably available AFAIK.

-I assume that you've contacted Plextor for the required data

-with respect to cases, remember that the larger cases will often support 2 PSUs

[Davos]

cm stacker wd be an ideal bet, but very expensive

[waagghh]

I'd appreciate any info you could give me on the draw from that drive =)

 

Finding startup data so far has been a bust. I did manage to track down a guy who gave me some PSU specs on ones that they sell and they range from 200-400W. I've read to assume a cdrw drive eats approx 20w so that puts me in a 0%-100% startup spike with the duplicators that I found. So i'm guessing I'm going to have to aim for the upper end of the power scale in order to make sure we get a stable source.

 

Thx for the help

[charlie22911]

a 350w should do since you dont have the other crap to worry with.

[karl pell]

I'll post the Plex data later, but, for now, you might look at:

http://www.extreme.outervision.com/index.jsp

and

http://www17.tomshardware.com/howto...upplies-04.html

[charlie22911]

i doubt 9 drives would eat more than 250w cuz.

[waagghh]

Thanks again guys

 

Prob going to shoot for an inexpensive 350w one, either way we can build one cheaper than we can buy them from online retailers. I've only seen one 8to1 that had a 400w, everything else I could get wattage on was a 320w or smaller. While I cant get any info on the controller draw, I doubt its drawing all that extra wattage.

[red930]

I've got a couple of questions.

 

Why are you building something that you can buy?

 

Are you trying to build a rig for yourself or mass production?

 

If you are trying to enter the duplication hardware market you would do a lot better consulting an Electrical Engineer that designs such hardware.

 

Disk duplication is a tricky thing that uses a custom board and OS. I would never trust my dupe jobs to anything other than a quality rig from a vendor with a long track record of success.

[Kamel]

i did some tests for you, wasted a DVD, just for you, feel special lol.

 

(i do have decently accurate power consumption monitoring on my machine, so these aren't guesses)

 

my initial power usage was 261-262 watts, without the drive being active at all.

my power usage while my drive was spinning up (40x cd, 16xdvd, this was a dvd at the time) was 286 watts. during the write process it was 271-273. when it had a buffer underrun to prevent it took 275.

 

i would say it's a good bet that even the highest performing cd drives will have a highest surge of 30 watts. with 8 drives, the maximum power drain upper average i am guessing to be somewhere around 240 watts. the lower average (at highest power drain time, spin up)i would guess to be somewhere around 200 watts.

 

I wouldn't go any lower than 400watt psu if i were you. figure out what your computer itself needs, then add 200 watts to that. especially if it's a basic computer (i wouldn't think it will need too much juice to run, without a monitor mine is pretty high load and it gets around 172 watts). a high quality 400w should do, or if you want to be sure that you can do it, get one that's around 500+ watts. i would say a 500+ watt PSU would be more than enough. actually, i would suggest the famous 530watt fortron for that job, but you probably could get by pretty easily with less.

 

edit: bare bottom of the line i would say you're going to be draining a maximum of 300 watts. This is _actual_ power drain (though only during spinup, you probably wont need all the wattage it wants), so if you got a quality 300 watt psu it may work just fine, but 350 would be more of a buffer area.

 

anyway, the data i gave you was real, so take it and do with it what you want. it really depends on the system draw, if the system draws only like 50 watts itself, then you may be only drawing 250 watts all together.