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Comment by bbojan | Hacker News Reader

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bbojan·

I just recently had a problem where writes to M.2 SSD wouldn't work due to a faulty PSU. Everything else was fine.

Took me 3 SSDs, 2 motherboards and 2 PSUs to figure out what the cause of the problem was.

It was a ThermalTake TR2 500W PSU. No graphics card (integrated graphics) so 500W should have been fine.

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Power supplies are like car tires. It's not the right place to penny pinch. Always buy from reputable vendors. Thermaltake is not one of them.

I wasn't aware of that. This is my first time assembling a PC after probably 10 years, and I remember TT when they were making (good) coolers.

It's probably that they made good coolers and then decided to capitalize on the name by selling everything under the moon—i.e. reselling someone else's stuff.

The total wattage of a PSU isn't the issue. As another comment points out, it's the number of rails and amperage per rail. If the motherboard is drawing a lot of amps because of the CPU and you stick another high current device on it, you will run into issues. If you had a SATA SSD that drew the same current you wouldn't likely had any issue since it would have been on a different rail.

Oh, yeah! The T-word again! I've had nothing but trouble with ThermalTake PSUs! One even tried to kill me. Never buying that garbage again.

When possible I try to buy from companies that make a product, as opposed to just name/market/make cool stickers.

ThermalTake is just a reseller, Season is an example of a company that makes power supplies. Seasonic sells to others for relabeling, but also sells direct to consumers.

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