So here's something that interests me.
These are two hot-swapable server power supplies from two different manufactures.
*intro sting*
They're incredibly standard, a lot of people use these for making, uh,
high amperage battery chargers.
And other things.
It always impresses me that these are, relatively tiny, this is a very small form factor.
And this is a 750W power supply.
And you know here's a, actually this is quite large, uh, if you think about total volume
because of the length of it overall it's very small.
But um.
This is 675W.
And so this is from an IBM SystemX.
And this is from an HP Proliant something another.
But I want to see what kind of makes these up, what parts are in them, so on.
And if you notice they each have very similar small fan to blow air through it so you don't
have to worry too much about the capacitors in here, because servers like to run- like
to keep their internals cool.
They run a lot of air through them just to try to keep everything calm, so.
And the fact they have fans right on the end of it, that just shows, how much overkill
they go into.
So we'll start with the HP one right here.
My first thing to do is figure out what will actually will open this.
*chuckles* Yeah you gotta get out the *straining* big screwdriver, this is no match for this.
If you do tear down a power supply, you are doing so at your own risk, because you could
get shocked and stuff because the capacitors and stuff.
Don't die!
I'm fairly certain that in a server environment you would /never/ open one of these because
you just throw them away and replace them with a new module!
A lot of insulation.
Oh!
Packed!
Well that's about as far as I'm going to get this to go.
I do actually still want to be able use this power supply.
So we'll take a look.
Quite a bit of filtering happening immediately on the input, suppressors, so on.
Good grounding clip.
And then, man it just gets buried.
You can see this giant filter cap here.
Probably, uh this actually looks like a transformer.
This is a transformer or a choke.
More big caps there.
Very tall stack of inductors (unintelligible).
Notice they have several There's two magnetic cores here.
And then the copper turns around it.
These heat sinks that just kind of like come up and go through this I don't think it's
thermally conductive material, but you don't need to worry about getting heat to the casing
cus you're blowing air through everything.
They use these tiny little connectors to connect the fan.
And this just jumps power.
Okay, quite interesting.
So, one thing we can see is that the fan is controlled by this chip, and they use a jumper
wire.
They apparently don't have enough room to get traces over, so they use this jumper wire.
Or maybe this a dynamic board and you can do whatever, well I don't know.
Anyway they don't have enough room to do anything other than use this jumper to take wires all
the way back here, which then leads to this part that just jumps the connections right
to the fan connectors and headers over.
And then they have these little diodes for back EMF protection, the [electrical] noise
from the fans.
I noticed there is a incredibly huge number of links going up to this top board here.
All kinds of monitoring.
The interesting thing they did here is they actually have this little riser board that's
the connector that's probably for two reasons.
One, to kind of get it higher so all the different spacings involved with making this hot-swapable
work.
And also.
Probably for rigidity.
If you were to have the main PCB be also the edge connector and you shove that in there
with slightly the wrong tolerance, you could have a hairline fracture happen /anywhere/
on the power board and probably cause it to be faulty.
And you don't want that from your expensive power supply.
So probably the cheapest solution and best solution is to put it on this little riser.
So all you're doing is causing this tiny, very small, very little leverage to shake
and move or whatever.
And then that way you know you're guaranteed not to really have problem There's a lot of
stress relief and so on on here.
You can see they have another ground lead come over with a screw through it.
Lot's of different techniques to get all of the current across this.
Looks like, so, these power supplies are insane on what they can do.
The, +12V rail on this power supply can do 62.5 amps.
They also have a 12V 2.5 amp standby for running everything.
So this is interesting, this power supply, I guess that's maybe true for a lot of servers,
and I didn't even realize, This power supply doesn't have 5 volt, uh 3.3 volt and so on,
rails, it only seems to have a 12 volt output.
So all of these other connections, as far as I can understand, one of them is probably
going to be standby.
But, from what I understand is that I guess all of these are going to be the monitoring
and enable/disable stuff.
Wish I could take this out but I do need to use this supply, so if I make it too complicated
on myself then there goes that, right?
Very good, non magnetic screws for making putting this one little tiny one in the middle
here back.
Doesn't seem to be a problem but one thing is that they are relying heavily on this cardboardy
whatever material plastic something to prevent any kind of contacts from reaching the case
and shorting out, but I don't see that as being a problem and I don't know what the
tolerance is farther down, but it's probably safe.
Oh and if you're going to ask me to reverse engineer this, no.
Man, this would be awful to actually...
I'll have to get a... trashy one, or a cheap one, that's not for any of my servers really
take these apart completely . Because it's just layers upon layers of parts through there.
Quite insane.
Once you open it, you can't put it back together!
I knew it was a matter of doing that, but I was getting it wrong.
So, the trick is, place it in at an angle, and it pops right down.
Perfect!
Immediately what you will notice with the IBM one is that they don't have little copper
feelers for EMF and grounding continuity and all of that stuff through the case, so wonder
if that's actually in the chassis?
Can't tell, it's in a rack.
Also interesting is that they have these little headers up here, don't know if that's for
testing, diagnostics, or programming?
You know, serial numbers or something.
Another thing is "don't open it, there's electricity in here!"
I know there is!
There's scary amounts of electricity in here.
They're using these tiny little screws!
They're little babies!
Look, it's longer than the shot when I zoom in.
Let's zoom out here.
*funny noises*
Okay, we're in shot now.
Right, I've stripped two screwdrivers trying to get that one, we won't drill it out at
the moment, but what we can do is be really bad... just bend ourselves open.
So that shows you the insulation they have, wraps all the way around, I'm assuming completely
around.
And they've taped it on there.
We've got this copper stripping that presses up against the metal, to maintain ground better
and everything.
The input has quite a bit of filtering.
Looks like two chokes, two large suppression caps, several small ceramic packages, a fan
here, different arrangement.
We have the jumper, different manufacturers, jumper heading all the way over to this part
of the board here, and there's also another connection going over down to this bottom
board.
There might be a chip or something to understand what's going on.
Too bad the numbers keep being on the bottom, here's our giant filtering capacitor for the
main rectification.
Looks like two large transformers there, some smaller transformers or chokes, some very
small most likely transformer.
8 pin DIP package at the bottom.
Very large choke.
Tiny amount of filtering, and then this one, this chip, this power supply actually seems
to have a 3.3 volt rail .2 amps, so that might just be for their version of standby.
The 12 volt for actually running.
Put this back together.
Well we've reached the end of another video, if you really want to see me completely tear
these to bits, maybe some other ones, you know, strip them out completely, look at parts,
reuse components, do all kinds of insane, stupid things, with them, absolutely like
this video, share it, comment, telling me what you want me to do with what power supply,
if there's another one you want me to look at, or pick up, and see inside or want me
to just absolutely take to pieces, or even one of these, you know, let me know and I
will go even farther, but that's just a look inside of ones that are sort of from a working
environment, just showing that, you know, they get the size from smashing everything
together and making it to where they have to /pump/ air through to keep these cool.
Your ATX power supply with 750 watts has one giant, what, 120mm fan on it just running
calmly with all this free open area with all kinds of huge heat sinks just to let the power
dissipate but in here, there's not much space, so I bet these will get a little bit warm,
not too bad because it won't be in a server enclosure, even with the one fan, I bet they
get a little warm.
I'll also look into reverse engineering and doing some fun stuff with basically, you know,
welders.
*calm outro music*