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Geek Culture / On a scale of 1-10 how dumb is my idea?

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PAGAN_old
18
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 28th Jan 2006
Location: Capital of the Evil Empire
Posted: 25th Oct 2016 11:37 Edited at: 25th Oct 2016 12:01
So i got tired of being pestered by my friends who say that i got told of old but functoning metal lying around and decided to build something out of some of it. And as i always like to test new limits, i took advantage of building something out of the ordinary. But i am concerned about the long term effects it might have.

Anyway. I have a server tower which can physically support 2 PSUs (proboly for serid server motherboards)
4 ATA harddrives (totaling to 350 gigs- Not bad if you ask me)
2 PCI-SATA adapters (Case has ehough room to fit 4-5 more Sata HDDs, So why not? But unfoutunatley i simply dont trust any power supply below 400W. As it happens a lot cheap brand-named PCs that i tried to repair from meing "Dead" died slowly because they had a 300W PSU when they required at least a 450W. And as old as the hardware in this PC is, it would definatley be dissapointing if the motherboard wasnt provided with enough power that resulten in its slow and eventual death.

So i had this idea for this "File Dump as i decided to call it. le di

Run the motherboard and the harddrives/optical drives on different powersupplies so the hardware dosent have to struggle (there were also plenty of PCs that i fixed where a simple PSU upgrade, made a noticable improvement in the machines speed.

Maybe its a bit overkill, but i think its better to be safe than sorry waiting -for the umbrella-man to show up and lauhg at you. As for PSUs other than Highschool shop class years ago, ilitarallu know almost noting about them. One the most neat tricks my teacher inteocuced us to is testing a power-supply by shorting the green [ PWR=ON ] with either red or black wire. When i asked the teacher if thats dangerous, He explained that if running too long,with no resistance, the PSU can fry itself. (makes sence, But my question remains with is with WHERE? as in where should the resistance be? in the 20 pin MB cable or will giving Molex cables the job of dealing with the resistance that the HDDs create for it? I tried looking on the internet but i am the only one who seems to want to do something as crazy as this. I did already assempble the machine, and test it in that configuration and everything works. My question is about wether the PSU will fry or not because a few years ago i remeber running an old military-grade tablet computer for several months on this setup (Shorted 600W PSU and the tablet running off f one of the 12v rails.... the tablet was designet to be powerd from a car battery hence the 12v) And there was another thing like that too that i ran off of a shorted PSU for another month. And i never actually heard of anyone frying their PSU from running it shorted. And even when my teacher said it, he almost said it as if it wasnt a big deal anyway and he was usually much more serious when educating us on how computer hardware breaks.

i know people here are mostly programmers but this place seems like a good shot to find at least 1 electrical engineer who can clear this up.

I got the system assembled and working but for now its running off of just one 300W PSU (good thing they kill slow eh?)



I dont want to fry any hardware really, I know its old, but as long as it works and i can find a use for it, its simply nice to have.
Which is kinda the reason i made this thread.... Not really sure if my scheme is actually safe for the PSU or not.

Btw I was given a domain name for my birthday, and i was actually thinking this PC will be its hosting server

[EDIT]: Ok ivenn googling the problem wrong and there are some threads that ask or explain this same concept and everyone so far says that yes a PSU thats running off a paperclip method unconnected to a Motherboard does indeed require to have a load to keep it from overheating. Some people tell you to atach extra devices, Others a lightbulb and in my case, the load is at the 4 harddrives. And since nobody seems to specify where those loads need to go, am i correct in assuming that it dosent matter as long as something is being powered?
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