8 Jul
2009
8 Jul
'09
1:33 p.m.
On 7/8/09, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
On Jul 8, 2009, at 4:14 PM, Seth Morabito wrote:
> I just picked up my first 5150.
Congrats.
> I'd love to add a Winchester disk, but I
understand that the early PCs
> did not have a power supply capable of driving a Winchester.
Specifically, they didn't have the capability of powering contemporary
hard drives.
I'm pretty sure the 65W PS was the original one
that was too small to
support a hard drive.
Yep. That's the one.
My memory is that the power budget is strained with a full boat of
cards and a pair of floppies. You could power your hard drive from an
external power supply, but it might be tidier to install a PSU from an
XT and set your 65W PSU on the shelf to reinstall if you ever want to
run the original configuration.
Alternately, you might be able to get away with a minimal amount of
cards and a 3.5" MFM drive, but I would never try it without measuring
the draw of your present configuration and adding in the draw of the
drive _and_ adding some extra capacity for startup surges, etc.
If it were my box, I'd just drop an XT PSU in there and shelve the
original PSU for later.
-ethan