A 99.7% Efficient 300 W Hard Disk Drive Storage Server with Multiport Ac Coupled Differential Power Processing (MAC DPP) Architecture
High performance computing needs high performance power electronics. This paper presents the design of an ultra efficient series stacked hard disk drive (HDD) data storage server with a multiport ac coupled differential power processing (MAC DPP) architecture. A large number of HDDs are connected in series and ac coupled through a multi winding transformer with a single flux linkage. The MAC DPP architecture offers very low power conversion stress, can achieve extremely high efficiency, and can reduce the magnetic size and the component count. A hybrid time sharing and distributed phase shift control strategy is developed to modulate the ac coupled multi input multi output (MIMO) power flow. A 10 port MAC DPP prototype was designed to support a 300 W data storage system with 10 series stacked voltage domains. The MAC DPP converter was tested with a 50 HDD 12TB testbench, which can maintain normal operation of the server against the worst hot swapping scenario. The 300 W MAC DPP prototype can achieve 99.7% peak system efficiency and over 100 W/in3 power density.
2019 IEEE Energy Conversion Congress and Exposition (ECCE)