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This was a lot more than I was expecting vs running 29w idle and 38w load when I had a single hard drive, 2 gigs of ram (still two sticks) and using an Antec 80Plus PSU from the NSK 1380. Is my PSU potentially a culprit for a loss in watts as it may be more inefficient as such a low wattage?
Yes, this may be a problem. There is a article at this site with some measurements (IIRC it's power supply basics).
You can look up power usage of the hard drives on the Seagate website.
A 500GB WD RE3 drive needs about 8-9W of power, but according to the specs they may peak as high as 25W ... :{
So 2 * 9W = 18W ...
I guess SeaGate specs are about the same ...
Are 2.5" drives an option? I have a SuperMicro 5015-H server with two 2.5" disks and it uses about 31W max ... I did some basic hard drive speed measurements, and they weren't that slow (Fast enough for my use anyway).2
Personally, I would recommend the picoPSU for a system like this ... I'm getting that one for my Atom 330 server (SuperMicro board) which I'm building at the moment....
As a sidenote, does that board actually support 4GB of memory? Most Atom 330 board I saw only supported 2GB Max.