jgreco
Resident Grinch
- Joined
- May 29, 2011
- Messages
- 18,680
This makes me think I really should be OK, when running 24 drives on brand new redundant 1400W PSUs.
Yeah, if you look at the Supermicro 24 drive systems, they typically offer a chassis option with a smaller set of redundant PSU's (think 920 currently) and then a larger. This roughly corresponds to "single CPU and not so complex" and "dual CPU with extra cards".
The PSU sizing guidance is more for people who don't really have the engineering background or resources to understand where these "big" numbers come from, and who've used some craptacular Internet website calculator for PSU sizing that only provides a handful of watts per drive. There were a number of insipid debates by people who were convinced that undersizing your PSU to save a few bucks and putting thousands of dollars of electronics and drives at risk is a "good thing" or somehow "energy saving". I don't actually care if you want to do that, but, damn it, I want people to make educated choices, not just listen to some handwavey stuff, so that's why I banged out all the reasoning and how the numbers were derived.
Other large system manufacturers like 45Drives also talk about power design, and I encourage people to read that too.
Anyways, the rules can be relaxed as the drive count and PSU size increase, but it is kind of complex and more than a little specialized as an area of knowledge. For the most part, your chassis manufacturer will probably ballpark you into the right place if you let them, and if you're running the 1.4k's on a 24 drive dual CPU system, you should have plenty of power.
It isn't clear to me what's wrong here, but you seem to be taking reasonable steps to isolate and resolve. I expect you'll find an issue sooner or later.