We look at what kind of PSU and motherboard are necessary to make a 2 Tb fit into a current setup.
Introduction
You’re a storage fanatic, you’ve never thrown away a thing in your life, you were diagnosed a packrat from an early age, let’s face it – you could use some more gigabyte storage in your life. Enter the 2 Tb hard drives that are now coming to the market. For a casual storage user such as myself, a 1 Tb hard drive never even half-fills, but if you’re into lossless audio and HD video, then you’ll want to look into the hard drive requirements for power supplies.
Power Supply Requirements
A hard drive, even a 2 Tb hard drive doesn’t require that much power from a power supply – at the most, you should reserve 50 Watts of power for the hard drive specifically. Obviously, other components in your setup will inevitably require large amounts of power, with a decent graphics card; you’re looking at a power supply that pulls at least 500 or 600 Watts.
If you’re even remotely interested in putting up multiple hard drives, a motherboard, a graphics card, and a heavy-duty processor, you’ll require at least a 750 Watt Power Supply, and that will set you back a considerable amount of money.
Motherboard Requirements
Really, a 2 Tb hard drive only requires a slightly beefier power supply, because any modern motherboard with SATA connectors and connections for power can make a hard drive work. Just connect the hard drive to both the power supply and the motherboard and it should all work.
On the odd chance that your motherboard doesn’t have a SATA connection, there are always IDE-to-SATA connectors that make the SATA cables play nice with an IDE connection. Keep in mind though, if you use this connector, you’ll need an additional power adapter to make the SATA work.
One thing to keep in mind is that with a large amount of space in the case of a 2 Tb hard drive, you’ll need extra RAM to be able to run everything you want at once. At bare minimum, the RAM requirement is about 2 Gb, but if you have a 64-bit processor, you might want to bump that number up to 4 Gb, it’ll work even better than with 2.
And that’s all there is to it – following the RAM and Power Supply Requirements, you should be ready to go even with your current motherboard. After all, money is hard to come by these days, and if you can use your existing setup, why bother changing anything at all?
