On Tue, 2007-01-23 at 10:24 -0700, Robin Laing wrote: > I think with the power supply being low, the drive head will swing > back and forth between park and seek, thus can heat up the drive. Of > course in todays newer drives, heat can be an issue without this. You would have thought that some of the "intelligence" in IDE might have put a voltage sensor in there, that made it shut down if it wasn't operated with full voltage... But that would be too sensible. > If you demand it, you will get a good power supply. Of course that > good power supply can fail, as it did in my case. The issue for me > was that the warranty required me to ship it a certain way to the USA > at my cost which would have been over 50% of the cost of a new power > supply. Thus the warranty was useless. Yes, I've noticed that with quite a few things. It's their escape clause for doing warranty jobs. I'd be arguing that broken devices was entirely the manufacturer's fault, and their duty to pay. There's a lot of things that have a useless warranty where I live, simply because of the expense you'd have to go through to send it away. > I found an online power supply calculator that you put in the number > of drives, fans, processor type and other accessories. It would > calculate the size of power supply needed. I've seen one or two of those before. They made me think of stereo system salesman, the ones who push what *they* call a 800 Watt unit onto clueless customers. Some of the estimations seem a little exhorbitant. - You need a 500 Watt power supply. - What for? I'm not trying to cook a roast with it... -- (Currently testing FC5, but still running FC4, if that's important.) Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.