Dual Power Supplys?

[Ol'Tunzafun]

I have recently acquired half a dozen 486's, all working, in a "dumpster dive". Of course they all have small HD's, ranging from a 170MB SCSI to a 3.2 GB IDE. I have been musing about what a guy could do with something like this and one of the ideas I am entertaining is throwing all these HD's into one (necessarily modded) case and using two or more power supplys to power them if only for the 12v. circuit. What kind of problems am I going to run into here? Will I have to use the same "power good" signal for both P/S's? I guess the question is, "How can I make them work in tandem?"
I just want to have some fun with this. Any other ideas are most welcome. It just seems like such a waste and I'm not going to give up until I make something useful out of this.

[user0209]

It will be a waste of electricity and tylenol money. I recommend you got rid of them asap.

[Bigjakkstaffa]

Theres nothing wrong with 3gb HDD's, hats what my spare is running (well - after win2k is installed)

You could probably do this, but it would be a ridiculous amount of chew for something that at the end of the day aint gonna be THAT good, as user pointed out

--Jakk

[G Ray88]

Not to sure how you would make two-power supply’s work that wasn’t setup that in the first place. I have a Dell Power edge 4100 server that came with two 700-watt power supply’s, and three 9GB SCSI HD, and 3 large case fans, when I turn the thing on I use it to circulate the air in my shop.

[Giblet Plus!]

I'd be willing to take one of the 700 watt power supplies off your hands.

mmmm peltiers mmmmm

[rmanet]

while we're tossing around silly ideas (and I'm clueless on some of this stuff), why not just give it a go with a couple of old promise controllers - sure could find some pulls for $5-10 bucks for those old drives- and both PSUs - but use the one for the drives and/or the mobo alone?

that way if you've done soemthing wrong you'll only fry just a drive, or the mobo you're starting with but heck, you got five more of each to play with

[G Ray88]

The two power supplies are redundant, it's a dual 200MHz, processors, an old socket 8, each has a 512-cache, has a raid level 5 card with 32mb of ram, has 6 HD bays and they are hot swappable.
And it's fun to tinker with, and power for extras is no problem!

[Ol'Tunzafun]

Hey, I never thought of promise controllers. I like that idea. I have a couple old I/O controllers around here that I thought I might use. I'll have to keep an eye out for one or two of them. I already found out how to tandem the power supplys at PC-MOD.COM so I'd be half way there if I knew where I was going. I don't really have that much time to work on it right now so I have a lot of time to mull it over. I know that if I had a lick of sense that I would just keep the two 3.2GB drives and jettison the rest but I just want to have some fun with this and maybe learn something.

[Giblet Plus!]

G Ray88 : Since your PSUs are redunant, you don't need both, do you? A 700 watt power supply could power a peltier and a whole system.

The promise controller idea sounds good, as long as you can find them cheap enough to be worth it.

Oh boy I just hit 600 posts!

[jad1097]

Ol'Tunzafun, I've been thinking about doing this for quite some time now.

thanks for the link.

[G Ray88]

Giblet Plus, the power supplies are proprietary for Dell, it would probably more trouble to convert to something that you could use in another system, then the amount of time to make it work. I will probably keep one as spare, I'm currently only using one at the moment.
But thanks for asking.