PSU (OT, not openSuse specific, but what would YOU do?)

English Hardware
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Mods/admins, please feel free to move this if you feel it is in an inappropriate place.

Whilst working on upgrading another PC, I bought a PCI ide/PATA controller card, so that my family’s old HDD’s could be used in a planned new mainboard, which only had SATA ports on-board. The card arrived, and as I know that they can sometime be a little strange when announcing themselves to BIOS, I stuck it in my PC to ‘test’. The machine spun up its fans etc POSTed, but upon reaching the BIOS stage, the PC turned itself off. I pulled the card, tried again. Pulled all USB devices… Nada, Nowt, Nuffink… Dead. Sigh. Curses. Things thrown around room. Left for a good while, in case something in the PSU had tripped. NOPE.

I decide that I have toasted the Mainboard.
I find one local on fleaBay, unwisely priced to include £10.00 postage (£10.00!! I could post a bicycle for that!!) Call the vendor and arrange to collect if successful. as expected, no-one else wanted to pay £10.00 posted so I get the Mainboard for cheaps. Install it, and… You’ve guessed? Not the Mainboard, but the PSU is blown.
Now this PSU is (was) a truly magnificent piece of high-end kit, similar to this, except that mine was 530W (Tagan TG530-U22)

http://www.tagan.com.tw/page/datasheet/U37/TG_500_U37_EN.pdf

In the spec it includes:
OVP
OCP
OTP
OPP
UVP
(over-volt, over-current, over-temperature, over-power, under-voltage, and short-circuit protection respectively)

It was being used to run a PC massively under its capabilities, just a basic PC, no power-hungry graphics cards, ordinary dual-core AMD CPU, No CD/DVD drive, one SSD, one HDD. There is no chance that the new card, working correctly was drawing too much power etc.

This is the card:

ATA133 - – - ATA133 CARD, ULTRA ATA 133 PCI | CPC

I am currently running the PC on a no-name, cheapo, underpowered, 300W PSU that I found in the shed, lashed up as it only has a 20 pin power connector block, and my MB has a 24 pin socket.

I have not dared to test the card in another PC!

(I just looked at the card, whilst looking for a serial #, and there is what might be a short-circuit solder trail between two pins of the IDE socket)

When I first thought I had blown the MB, I called the supplier, they offered credit note, refund or replacement. Do I have justification to demand a replacement PSU? (they do sell them!)

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tagan tg530 u22 - Google Search

Review: Tagan TG530-U15 and TG530-U22 power supplies

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On 2013-10-18 12:26, wakou wrote:

> (I just looked at the card, whilst looking for a serial #, and there is
> what might be a short-circuit solder trail between two pins of the IDE
> socket)

Wow.

Confirmation would be very interesting.

> When I first thought I had blown the MB, I called the supplier, they
> offered credit note, refund or replacement. Do I have justification to
> demand a replacement PSU? (they do sell them!)

IMO, both the PSU and the card are faulty.

I think the PSU is, or was, faulty, because a good PSU should protect
itself in case of overload or shortcircuit. But I’m not sure such a
thing exists anymore.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)

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Surely (unless on fire) the worst a peripheral card can do to the PSU is ask for too little/too much voltage/amps, which the PSU should be able to handle (may crash/shut down system to do so) while preventing damage to itself. So sounds like PSU has failed to meet its safety standards and I’d RMA it. Good PSUs are expensive for a reason.

If the peripheral card is bad I’d RMA that as well, or since it was only a tenner, extract £10 of value by beating it with a hammer etc.

If I needed to support an IDE drive on a SATA only motherboard, personally I would firstly check whether the IDE drive is worth more than a similar used SATA drive (might be), or whether I could sell one and buy another only for the transaction costs, cloning the disk using the outgoing system. If not, or no IDE system available, so you want/must keep the drive, I would look at getting an IDE to SATA converter rather than a PCI card, because the converter is sure not to have specific driver requirements. Something like eBay item 320759737706 seems suitable (have no relation to seller, have not used this product, have not done due diligence on this seller, it just looks like the right item).

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Thanks, RJ. I actually have a couple of those, but as this was going permanently on to someone else’s system, I thought that the controller card was a far more robust and sensible option. I have read that the little on drive converters can be flakey, and I have had problems with them myself. For instance I have read that they have been known to burn out, and for me they often will not recognise a drive, or CD/DVD when attached.

As for buying a new drives… it just seems mad when they already have two drives in perfectly good order, and with plenty of room, plus the CD/DVD, why would I want them to spend £100 or more for new ones when a £10.00 card would do the job?