If you’re replacing a 350W power supply that was in the computer when you bought it, you should be fine with a quality 350-400W power supply. If 350W was enough before, it’ll be enough now.
Rosewill is Newegg’s house brand. They aren’t terrible, necessarily, but I’d probably go with Corsair, Antec or Cooler Master for something as important as a PSU.
Rails refer to physical rails inside the PSU that carry current. If you followed your molex connectors into the box, you’d find that the yellow wires (12V) were all connected to one rail, and the red wires (5V) were all connected to another, and so on and so forth.
I want to make some flippant remark about opening up the PSU and having a look, but IIRC if you (I) don’t know what you’re (I’m) doing, touching the wrong component inside even an unplugged PSU can do some harm.
But it’s pretty neat that the term comes from an actual physical doodad. Can I assume they look similar to bus bars?
Tiny data point that’s entirely based on correlation:
New PSU came in yesterday. Got it hooked up no problem, but during POST I got a S.M.A.R.T. error on one of my drives (the drive that houses all our pictures, videos, and music :eek: ), IDE Channel 5. IIRC, S.M.A.R.T. is somewhat … less than dispositive, but heed its warnings nonetheless. I’m glad I did, because I started a copy operation and it’s crawling along at about 4Mps. That’s not right. So while it’s anecdotal, it is one hell of a coincidence to have happened right after a dead PSU. The case was plugged into an APC UPS, so it’s unlikely to have been a power spike causing havoc somewhere else.
Heed pdunderhill’s advice–I have this drive in a mirrored RAID and backed up to a NAS device–also mirrored. I can’t tell you how chill I am about this hardware fault and can’t imagine how freaked I’d be if there was data at risk.
Oh, can I ask a quick question: how do the IDE channels correlate to the physical ports? There are two empty IDE ports and an empty floppy port. Is Ch. 5 SATA port 3 or 2?
Having just miraculously recovered from a double drive raid failure when my backups were incomplete, I can’t emphasize the bolded part enough.
On most motherboards the Floppy port isn’t involved in that at all. IDE Channel 5 would likely be SATA1. (presuming it starts at SATA0)
IDE Primary Master (ch0)
IDE Primary Slave (ch1)
IDE Secondary Master (ch2)
IDE Secondary Slave (ch3)
SATA0 (ch4)
SATA1 (ch5)
etc.
My understanding is that this varies by both chipset and SATA/IDE Emulation mode selection (which has to be involved, since legacy/standard IDE mode only typically allows 4 total channels–who else remembers the early days of SATA and that issue? =P)
Thanks. The board’s (Asus M2N4-SLI) SATA ports are labeled 1-4. Does that mean it’s:
IDE Primary Master (ch0)
IDE Primary Slave (ch1)
IDE Secondary Master (ch2)
IDE Secondary Slave (ch3)
SATA Port 1 (ch4)
SATA Port 2 (ch5)
etc. ?
My primary concern was copying data off the RAID drives, so I didn’t spend too much time in Disk Management or Device Manager. Its listing of disks doesn’t seem related to which SATA port they’re on, and since they’re both the same drive they have the same model number (so the BIOS screens and Windows error message isn’t saying which one it is).
you really have to hope the board’s documentation will tell you, because they can label the ports any way they want. It’s not like I can look at my mainboard and tell you anything useful; mine’s Intel and their chipsets haven’t had IDE controllers for several generations now.
What it comes down to is that cheaper PSU makers tend to label theirs at peak power while higher-end manufactures tend to label theirs at the amount of power the unit can reliably sustain.
For example, a 400W cheapo unit could conceivably for a little while sometimes maybe put out 400W before something goes wrong, while a high quality unit will put out 400W all day every day.
Higher-end units also tend to have more / longer / easier to manage cable configurations.
FWIW, I have used Antec and Sparkle for many years but my latest is a Corsair.
I did a fair amount of research when upgrading my setup about 5 months ago, and the consensus was that they were reliable and good quality. They also make the most well-designed case I’ve ever seen.