Aspire XC-866 EB11 Changing HD; do I need to change Power Supply?

Zooks

Hi, I have a n Acer Aspire XC-866 EB11 Mini tower. Acer phone support told me the power consumption is 220 watts. It came with a 1 Terabyte Western Digital Blue Hard Drive, and I want to change it to a WD 2 Terabyte Black. My question is, do I need to change the power supply? And if so, how many watts? (i3, 8 GB Ram, 3.6 GHz)

Thread was edited to add model name to the title

ttttt

@Zooks

Just upgrade from one TB to two TB HDD doesn't need a power supply upgrade. 

However, if you are currently using this 1 TB HDD as the boot drive, I'll suggest take this opportunity upgrading to a 2.5" SATA3 SSD if your budget allows. A 2.5" SATA3 SSD is three times faster than a traditional, spinning HDD. You will see a big performance increase with your PC.

With the spec of 9th generation Intel CPU, it is highly likely that you can even use PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 NVMe SSD as the boot drive, which is another 5 times faster than 2.5" SATA3 SSD ( close to 30 times faster than traditional HDD). Currently, I do not have the motherboard diagram to confirm this. Hopefully some Aces from this community will come up with a diagram for this Canadian variant PC.

ttttt

@Zooks

Just upgrade from one TB to two TB HDD doesn't need a power supply upgrade. 

However, if you are currently using this 1 TB HDD as the boot drive, I'll suggest take this opportunity upgrading to a 2.5" SATA3 SSD if your budget allows. A 2.5" SATA3 SSD is three times faster than a traditional, spinning HDD. You will see a big performance increase with your PC.

With the spec of 9th generation Intel CPU, it is highly likely that you can even use PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 NVMe SSD as the boot drive, which is another 5 times faster than 2.5" SATA3 SSD ( close to 30 times faster than traditional HDD). Currently, I do not have the motherboard diagram to confirm this. Hopefully some Aces from this community will come up with a diagram for this Canadian variant PC.

Zooks

Thanks for the quick reply, ttttt. I already have a 2 TB Western Digital Black, that’s why, and because it has a longer warranty (5 years instead of 2), and is faster than the Blue, and it’s a bit bigger.

Here is the reason I thought I might need to change the power supply:

“The average power requirements for the WD Blue PC series ranges from 3.3W to 6.8W for read/write, 2.3W to 6.1W for idle, and 0.24W to 1.2W for standby and sleep. For the WD Black PC series, the power requirements are 6.8W to 9.5W for read/write, 5.8W to 8.1W for idle, and 0.8W to 1.3W standby and sleep“

I don’t want to “stress” the current power supply.

I will also look into an SSD.

billsey

Yes, the drives will all pull the same amount of maximum power, no matter what size they are. Your system actually has enough power to handle two HDDs and a SSD. Since yours came with a 1TB HDD you might think seriously of putting a SSD in instead of another HDD. The SSD will make everything much, much faster and though it will cost more the extra is well worth it. Your system has an M.2 slot on the motherboard. It's either empty right now or has a small Optane memory card in it. The Optane memory is designed to cache some HDD data to minimize the slowdown inherent in those old style drives. You could replace the Optane with a SSD (whatever size you can afford, I'd look at 1TB and 2TB sizes since your 1TB HDD is getting squeezed) and leave the HDD in after repurposing it as data storage only.

Zooks

Thanks Billsey!

Would this work?

WD_Black 1TB SN750 SE NVMe Internal Gaming SSD Solid State Drive- Gen4,-PCIe, M.2 2280, Up to 3,600 MB/s - WDS100T1B0E

ttttt

@Zooks

Ace @Billsey confirmed you can use M.2 NVMe SSD.

If I am in your position, I'll get a PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 NVMe SSD of probably 1 TB or less capacity ( need not be 2TB that big) as boot drive and use that 2 TB WD Black HDD as the data drive only. This way, you will get daily high performance and still have plenty of data storage capabilities. A win-win situation.

 I think you probably still have enough SATA3 connectors on motherboard and power connectors to fit that 1 TB WD Blue in as a third drive.

ttttt

@Zooks

I have WD SN750 Black with one of my PCs (not the SE version), and it is a good drive. However, there must be a mistake, it is not a gen 4 drive. 
WD's gen 4 NVMe SSD is the SN 850 black, speed up to 7,000 MB/s, a speed that your PC's motherboard cannot achieve.

Zooks

ttttt said:

@Zooks

I have WD SN750 Black with one of my PCs (not the SE version), and it is a good drive. However, there must be a mistake, it is not a gen 4 drive. 
WD's gen 4 NVMe SSD is the SN 850 black, speed up to 7,000 MB/s, a speed that your PC's motherboard cannot achieve.

Ah. Thanks so much, ttttt! I’ve been looking at them (the Western Digitals, I really trust the Black Disk Drives for my data), and I saw that the 850’s were the latest Gen. I’m a newbie to the SSD’s so I’m trying to keep up with you guys! I see the SE is a “cheaper” in price model with slightly less performance? I think that’s the model I quoted above, around $125 Cad. The 750 non-SE is around $200 Cad for a 1 TB.

ttttt

@Zooks

$200 CAD for 1 TB is little expensive in today's standard.  There are other gen 3 NVMe SSDs that I use, all are 500GB drives and I am happy about all. When I bought them, there were all around USD $70 range (sale prices), with the Silicon Power one even cheaper.

Silicon Power A80, WD SN 750 Black, SK Hynix Gold P31, SS 970 EVO, SS 970 EVO Pro...etc.

The WD SN 850, being a gen 4 drive, was the most expensive one, bought a 500GB one for USD $130.

Zooks

Okay. I was looking on Amazon (.ca), maybe I should check around.

billsey

No need to get the gen4 drive, as your buss is gen3. The gen4 won't run any faster and the gen3 should be less expensive. They are both x4 so I'd choose the WDS100T3X0C over the WDS100T1B0E.