Power Requirements

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CliffEmAll

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I am trying to build a little fileserver / CVS server / Postgresql server, and after trying to do what I wanted with old PII-era components, I finally broke down and bought some new equipment off of newegg.

I have an MSI P4MAM-V motherboard, a Celeron 2.4G processor, a single stick of Kingston 128M DDR RAM, a 20G hard drive for the system, 3 40G hard drives in a RAID5 array, and a CD-ROM drive.

With all the devices attached, I get through most of the POST process, but get a "disk read error". If I unhook the power connector from one of my drives, then everything works very nicely, so I am thinking this is a matter of not having enough power. I have tried using a 300W Antec power supply and a 400W Rosewill power supply, and neither seems capable of running everything.

Maybe I am just naive, but it doesn't seem to me like this should be using nearly this much power. I am not running a graphics card, no USB, no firewire, no sound card, its basically a barebones system with a few more IDE devices than normal.

I thought about underclocking the CPU to try to free up more power for other devices, but it seems I cannot set it below the default 100Mhz FSB.

Is there anything I can do here other than lay out another $100 for an enthusiast-level power supply ?

I looked through a listing of typical power requirements, and when adding everything up it seemed my system should have no difficulty running on 250W, but that definitely doesn't seem to be the case.
 
Ok, that tells me that I need ( as I suspected ) a 253W power supply. So given that a 400W power supply doesn't seem to be getting the job done, is there some other possible explanation for this behavior?
 
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