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[benn600]

WATTS.

I finally bought a new power supply for my server--everyone has been telling me to since building it.  With 19 hard drives and a moderately recent motherboard/processor/server chassis and fans, I was using an Antec 400 watt power supply.  It ran fine for four months.

Addition: BTW: nothing bad happened, I'm changing by choice.

But I wanted to order another 500GB hard drive as an on-hand spare, for obvious reasons with RAID.  So when I found the drive to buy on Newegg, I noticed they had a nice combo with a $30 discount on an already decent priced power supply.  It's a Rosewill 700 watt with single, large fan.

After about 30 minutes of tearing everything apart and replacing the power supply / hooking everything up, it booted fine.  I then checked my UPS to see the power usage.  It is about 50 watts lower!  Before the change, it was drawing around 280 watts but now it draws only 230 watts or so!  That's quite a nice drop and will save us more than $2 per month, not to mention the extra 3 minutes or so of runtime on my UPS!

The previous power supply is probably 4 years old so maybe it was not as efficient.  Either way, I now have an extra drive and a more capable power supply.  Unfortunately, I didn't jump for a redundant PSU but that shouldn't be a bid deal.  The price (including instant savings & combo savings) was $105 on the PSU and the hard drive (alotting combo savings to PSU not hard drive) cost $115.

[newsposter]

you can look for packaging stickers/marking that say 80+ or 90+.  These are the efficiency ratings of the power supply.

remember also that higher efficiency = less heat generation.

also see:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/08/09/pc_power_supplies/

[horse]

Wow, 50W drop with only the PSU change. As newposter mentions, that's 50W's less heat. approx 20% more efficient.
Now it's turning colder your house furnice will need to work a little harder to warm the house up :-)

[benn600]

You're right.  We always liked standing next to it because it was a couple degrees warmer.  Now, I feel the back and cannot believe that the heat output is not much different than my tiny desktop!  That's something I can't figure out.  How are 16 hard drives not giving off XXX GTUs (is that right?) of heat?  It should be boiling!  Part of my concern is that there may not be enough space between the drives to allow "more than mandatory" air to flow between them.  They are quite tight and when I was setting it up I was not sure if it would even work right...but it does pull air from the front because I feel it.  I just thought they were so tight they couldn't pull any air.

[ThoBar]

XXX GTUs (is that right?) of heat?

BTUs ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_thermal_unit

unless there's a measurement I'm not aware of....