On Sat, 12 Mar 2005 01:32:25 -0500, Don{ald} O. Woodall wrote:

>
>In , on 03/11/2005
>
>   at 07:52 PM, "Derek W. Keoughan"  said:
>
>Hi Derek
>
>>which is in the picture of it on Antec's website...
>
>     I never saw mention of it when I surfed Antec's web site. The only
>place I saw it mentioned was at Compugate.

Ah, okay.  It's listed under Products -> Accessories -> Power
Accessories

>>>     I was expecting to be able to plug in the lead to a hard drive; 5V,
>>>G, G, 12V.
>>>
>>>     Consider yourself warned.
>
>>I'm afraid I don't understand your complaint, Donald.
>
>     My lack of knowledge.  I was trying to buy a crutch that would supply
>the knowledge.

Well, it DOES provide an easy way to take the 3.3V reading, and doesn't
require you to use what may be a sacrificial motherboard to turn the
juice on to test it!

>>I'm really at a loss as to why you'd need a special device to stick a
>>voltmeter probe into a hard drive power connector...   put the black
>>probe in the hole for a black wire... touch the red probe to the one
>>colour wire side for +5V and the other side for the +12V reading.
>
>     Yea, I could probably do that with one hand and read the meter.  BUT
>I don't have any experience with this type of
>thing to know what the permissible tolerance is.

Well, "the cleaner the better", really.

Here's a rough guideline - the default settings from Intel's own Active
Monitor software that tracks such readings and pops up an on-screen and
optional audio warning in case a threshold is breached...  (yeah, it's
Win32 only)

+12V - currently 11.875V, allowed range 10.8V to 13.2V (+/- 10%)

+5V - currently 4.87V, allowed range 4 to 6V (+/- 20%)

+ 3.3V - currently 3.111V, allowed range 2.3 to 4.3V  (+/- 30%)

This is just the defaults for that program.  As a rule of thumb, I've
always taken a +/- 10% as "acceptable".

>     So, I was hoping to buy a tool I could operate with one
>hand and would tell me if the voltages were with an acceptable tolerance
>so the power being sent down the line would not burn out a hard drive
>plugged into it.

No guarantees, of course... a good surge protector will do more than
knowing the PSU is within +/- 10% on normal power, I would think.  A
battery backup in a UPS even more so, as sags are more common than
spikes in power transmission.

>>http://www.antec.com/us/productDetails.php?ProdID=77003#
>
>>shows a picture of the product, showing how it's plugged onto the ATX
>>power connector of a power supply and will allow you to actually turn
>>said power supply on without connecting it to a motherboard 
>
>>(which is beneficial if it IS faulty, since motherboards tend to be more
>>expensive than these testers!)
>
>>And further,
>
>>http://www.antec.com/specs/instruction2.html
>
>     Well, it is very obvious that I don't think the same way the rest of
>the world does and can't find my way around a web site.

Heh... we all think a little different - isn't that why we're running
OS/2 software in the first place? :)

Hope this helps!

-Derek

Derek W. Keoughan,
Finnegan Software, Inc.,  Brampton, Ontario, Canada  http://www.finnsoft.com
416-410-4774 phone - 800-258-0033 toll free - 905-846-5516 fax

Consulting, Networking, Cabling, Internet, Hardware, Software, Tech Support
eComStation, OS/2 Warp/Server, WinXP/2000/NT/Me/9x, Linux
Customized PURRformance PC's & Servers, OnSite Services, Installations
and Upgrades

= Celebrating 10 years of "happily purring" computing - Founded
1995-02-02 =




 
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