I'm hoping i can get a bit of help/guidance on what went wrong and potential avenues for a fix.
I purchased a norco RPC-3216 case and outfitted it with 6 drives and to cache drives using unraid, i was using a 650 watt Thermaltake power supply and everything ran smoothly for a number of months but then looking back on it i did something pretty dumb.
The case has a total of 8 molex connectors for 16 drives and originally i only plugged 4 in but was having issues with 2 slots along one of the rows so i just assumed it was a power issue so i went out and bought some molex to sata adaptors and 2 new SSD’s to expand my cache array, I then hot plugged all these connections and when i did that the whole server died and when i tried to re-boot it something was shorting out and i lost my motherboard.
I tried the drives in another computer and they all seemed to be ok, so didnt lose any data that time, a week or so later i found out that you only need to use 4 molex plugs and not 8 so i bought a 2nd hand motherboard to test and this time only using 4 molex plugs but with all 4 SSD’s hooked up again the HDD backplane started smoking so i immediately tried taking away the 2 new SSD’s and i got no smoking problems at all but unfortunately at this stage i had lost all my drives due to the PCB’s burning out.
The thing i can't explain is why the 2 extra ssd’s were causing the short? Is it because i was pulling too many amps from the 5 volt rail?