Hard drive how much power

This is where the power requirements deviate. The PSU then delivers power to the individual components. The drive is then also connected via a data interface cable to the motherboard. This is usually a SATA cable.

In larger drives, the 12v connection is used for the mechanical components and the 5v connection for the circuitry. In smaller drives, the 5v rail is used to power both and the 12v connection is either stepped down or routed back through the ground connection.

When a laptop is plugged in the voltage is regulated in the cable via a transformer that converts the AC power supply to a DC power supply, usually to 12v as standard, from there the process is the same to transmit data to and power the hard drive. This comes into play when using different drives for external purposes. Some PSUs have unique connectors and may require a converter so it is worth checking your PSU to see if you require any extra converters.

While 2. That being said, solid state drives still consume less power than 3. The above table indicates the maximum power consumption of optical drives when burning a DVD or Blu-ray disc.

Optical drives consume just 1. When calculating power consumption of PC components, most consumers fail to factor in case fan power usage. That is a common mistake - While case fans typically don't contribute much to the power requirements of PC components, it does matter in certain scenarios: e.

Factors affecting case fan power consumption: fan speed measured in RPM , fan size 80 mm, 92 mm, mm, mm and mm and whether it has LED lights. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Burgi 6, 14 14 gold badges 38 38 silver badges 50 50 bronze badges.

Mysterylectricity Mysterylectricity 1 1 silver badge 2 2 bronze badges. This answer makes exactly two claims: 1. The OP's calculations were correct 2. The OP didn't understand the term "power dissipation". All the energy a hard drive consumes is lost as heat. Every last erg of it. It's not as if you're winding up any springs or lifting any weights!

So there is still a disparity between the claimed current requirement and the "power dissipation" numbers. That is incorrect. Some is lost as motion.

The disc does weigh something so that is the "lifting weights" part, except the weight is being spun, not lifted. But, other than the stored rotational energy which won't continually increase unless you continually increase the speed of the drive , all the energy "lost to rotation" is, in fact, converted to heat. Through friction. Otherwise, no energy is lost if a symmetric disk is just rotating.

And the object would not lose energy due to magnetism acting on it unless it was also magnetic and its rotation induced an electric current in some object around it.

This answer is totally wrong, misleading, The answerer fails to make a distinction between peak consumprion and average consumption. Show 11 more comments. Alex P. This is certainly an eye-opener. I knew I would be looking at more power than a laptop drive, but I didn't know it would be that much more. This is absolutely not true. Motors take more power when starting But for choosing a power supply, you need absolute peak values, even if that peak never shows up on a coarse measurement.

Of course you can also just hope that those peaks never happen all at the same time One example of these meters can be seen here on Amazon. For archival purposes here is an excerpt from the specification. These power measurements are done with DIPM enabled.