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can I use 2 smps power supplies on same pc?


TMaYaD

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Hi,

recently I had problems with my smps and got it repaired. It is rated at 300 watt. After that I baught a dvd writer.Now I have a cd writer, a dvd writer, and two hard disks. But it seems that my smps is not able to power all of them. I had to disconnect the cd writer.

Now I have a 270 watt smps from my old system, can I use it to connect the cd writer? or will that give me any probs.

thanks in anticipation.

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  • 1 month later...

Do this at your own risk.

I did this once on an old Abit motherboard with a Wake On Lan (WOL) connection. Using a WOL cable, connect your power supply to your wol.

On your extra power supply, take the motherboard connection. Connect one wire of the WOL to the dark green cable, then connect the other cable(s) to the black cables on either side of the dark green cable.

I can't quite remember the combination, but it worked to turn on the other power supply.

Don't forget to enable WOL in your bios.

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i read online a while back that someone jumpered 2 PS's together so that when the power button was pushed, both PS's turned on. I believe they jumpered the green wires together, and on the 2nd PS, combined that with a black wire to start it up.

you might find it on google

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  • 3 weeks later...

I saw this thread and it got me thinking, so I went home and did some experimenting. I've got a stack of old hard drives that are not in use, they range from 2.5GB to 10GB in size and I've been looking for a way to put them to use. I decided to build a pc using all of them. Here's what I did.

I have a "test" pc that I built from parts not in use. It's an old Socket A mobo made by ECS that I picked up from Fry's on the cheap a few years ago. It has an AMD Athlon XP 2000+ cpu and a single 512MB stick of memory. Video card is an old SIS PCI video adapter with 8MB. I also have an ATA expansion PCI card with two channels (for up to 4 hard drives). I bought this card for $5 at a swap meet in the hopes that it had RAID functionality, it didn't. Finally (and perhaps most importantly) I had an old 230W AT power supply lying around in addition to the 250W ATX power supply that was in the case. This AT power supply (not the ATX one) has the on/off switch attached to a cable about a foot long and doesn't rely on any connection to the mobo. You turn it on and turn it off with the switch, it cannot be powered up or down by software. Once assembled the ATX power supply had clearance problems with the cpu cooler so I ended up sitting it on top of the case.

So, I put the pc together just like any other using an old case that was gathering dust in the garage. I installed 3 hard drives and a 48X CD-ROM in the case and loaded up Windows XP to one drive and Server 2003 to another so I can boot from either one. The third drive is just for storage. When everything was up and running I added the ATA PCI card. Attached to the card by IDE ribbon cables are 4 additional hard drives of various sizes. Power for these 4 hard drives comes from the AT power supply which sits next to (not inside) the computer case. Now to boot up I first turn on the AT power supply and allow the drives to spin up, then hit the power switch on the case to fire it up. Since the 4 additional drives are pretty small I used the disk management tool to make them all "dynamic" drives and created a spanned volume between them. The result is Windows see them as a single ~20GB drive.

I can post a couple of pics if anyone is interested. It's not real pretty with the ATX psu sitting on top and the AT one sitting next to it. The case didn't have any mounting spaces for the four drives attached to the PCI card so they are sitting in the bottom of the case. The whole thing is virtually immobile due to wires hanging out everywhere but it works. I've never seen a pc with 7 hard drives until I built one. All together it still has less than 40GB of storage, it was purely an exercise in experimentation....and I had nothing better to do at that moment.

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  • 5 months later...

Hi all,

Thanks for your replys, I haven't seen this thread till now because I forgot to turn on thread tracking and assuming that I would get a mail on reply. Even then I finally dropped the fear of destroying something with experimentation and decided to go ahead with the idea. But when I tried installing two smps, I wondered how to power them up. Then I remebered my old PC (tomato board with cyrix 120Mhz processor with 16MB RAM and 650MB hard disk....antiques anyone;) and swapped the smps . Then I connected the old AT smps to optical drives and connected its power in cord to powerout of the atx smps in my pc. The at smps's switch(on/off) is always kept on and it powers up along with the atx smps.

So finally they are a happy couple :).

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