On Jan 12, 2006, at 4:33 PM, John Nall wrote:

> In particular, the power supply on my Dell Dimension 4700 rolled
> over and died very quickly after I added an extra SATA disk to it.
> In all fairness to Dell, I have absolutely no doubt that the
> power supply that came with the system would have run it OK as
> configured, but it apparently did not have much of a margin and
> the extra disk drive was too much.

IMO, the power supply provided with a system ought to be sufficient
to have you fill all the available bays in the box, and all the
connectors on the power supply.  Unless your upgrade involved
"Y cables" and add-on mounting brackets (or dangling drives), it
should have worked.

Furthermore, a power supply ought to react better to an overload
than just burning out.

Perhaps one of these would be useful:
http://www.weaknees.com/powertrip.php
It's a gadget designed to prevent the hard drives from powering
up all at the same time on boxes with limited power supplies.

BillW

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