two power supplies? will this work?

stimps · 06-23-2003, 10:06 AM

If you have a few Hdd's and a spare working sproggy sitting around, can you hook them up like this drawing shows? What I'm trying to get across is, if you use two power supplies, one good ITX purchased one, for the motherboard and a HDD, and the other sproggy or other home made supply, to supply power to the other Hdd and a DVD rom or some other device, will there be any problems?
You can see in this drawing I have made the negative all common. But the 5 volt and 12 volt wires are seperate.

So what do you all think? Will it all work happily? or will it go up in smoke? Will having it wired this way, with the IDE cables also tieing things together create data errors with the seperate 5 and 12volt supplies?

hijinks21 · 06-23-2003, 10:10 AM

it should work. i've done something like that when a 1U server at work would go down and I needed to get a floppy drive in it. I'd bring over a desktop computer and power the drive to the desktop's PSU and the floppy cable would go into the 1U server. The problem is you'd need a way to shut off the sproggy, since I'd think it would always be on giving the drives power.

tejesh83 · 06-25-2003, 07:12 PM

I did a similar setup in my desktop pc. I used an old AT PSU to power the 4 disk array, and used the ATX to power the MB. Worked just fine.

But, I wonder if I could use a sproggy to feed a little extra juice to my P4?

The P4 mobo has a 12V 4pin aux connector. Right now my Opus is only hooked to the ATX connector. It works ok sometimes, but is a little flaky at bootup. Sometime it takes a few tries to get going.

Is it possible to hook the 12V out from the sproggy into the P4 Aux connector? I've already ordered an adapter to convert one of the drive connectors from the Opus into a P4 connector. I hope this will solve the issue. But the P4 needs about 5.8A, but the Opus only provides 5A (6.5 Peak).

stimps · 06-25-2003, 09:13 PM

well i guess so. The only thing you have to make sure is ok, is that the grounds are all connected, and the supplies 12v are all seperate.