redundant PSU

Thread Starter

electronis whiz

Joined Jul 29, 2010
512
I have a server i'm working on that I was given a few yrs back. the system currently has 7 SCSI drives, dual pIII xeon CPU, 2 dims, cd-rom, FDD, few PCI cards. I added 5 more SCSI drives and ran for few minutes doing test on scsi setup. having issues with a drive so started looking inside smelled something hot. near as I can tell it is the PSU from calculations that puts me at about 680 watts load, osu is only 402 watts. system has a redundant PSU setup that I haven't been using because if one fails i'll grab the other.
can I put these in together then double the PSU capability? so have an 808 watt PSU?
 

LDC3

Joined Apr 27, 2013
924
If the grounds are connected together, you should be able to run a few drives from each PSU, although I would have my entire RAID array powered by one of the PSUs. But before changing anything, check the internet about combining PSUs since there are limitations so the don't get overloaded.
 

Thread Starter

electronis whiz

Joined Jul 29, 2010
512
I did bit of research seems would work, also talked to friend that's an electrician and seemed to think would be ok. no way of knowing about the system though. have tried doing research on it before an can find nothing. seems to be a custom system made by Unisys. my only concern would be the wires, and the panel the PSUs plug into since smell was coming from that area hard to tell if PSU or board in the PSU bay. thinking PSU internal board would think be just distribution, alarm for failed PSU.
 

Litch

Joined Jan 25, 2013
85
Are you sure the PSU's are not designed to be running in parallel? (IE. Load balancing)

And at 700W load, you're looking at over 50Amps on the 5V rail and quite a few on the 12V as well - that's a lot of amperage for the PSU backplane to take if it is indeed only designed to run 1 at a time (at 480W).
 

Thread Starter

electronis whiz

Joined Jul 29, 2010
512
the system is meant to have 2. I think for redundancy, which tells me they have to be in parallel. so in theory 2 should double output.
I don't think I'll end up doing this because these PSU put out a lot of heat (more than all rest of system). thinking just use old 200W atx, or rig up some switch system so I have 1 set or other, but not both. not sure which of those I'll do yet though. both have pros and cons I need to consider.
 
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