Hello,

 

I've finally bought myself the components I was missing to build my UnRAID box, but I'm now having a couple of questions.

 

First, I bought a CooleMaster eXtreme Power Plus 500W. As it turns out, it appears to have 2x 12V rails. (Did not know that at the time of the purchase). Could I face some issues with it? If so, what issues?

 

Second, the Power Supply only has 4x SATA ports. (This I knew when I bought it.) If I wanted to expand to, say, 12 drives, would I need to buy a PS with 12x SATA Ports? Or is there any workaround?

 

thanks,

del

First, I bought a CooleMaster eXtreme Power Plus 500W. As it turns out, it appears to have 2x 12V rails. (Did not know that at the time of the purchase). Could I face some issues with it? If so, what issues?

Possibly, if you decide to put 20 drives in the system.  It should work just fine you might just have to do some "balancing" of the drives on different rails so that no single rail gets overloaded.

 

Second, the Power Supply only has 4x SATA ports. (This I knew when I bought it.) If I wanted to expand to, say, 12 drives, would I need to buy a PS with 12x SATA Ports? Or is there any workaround?

Monoprice.com sells adapters that will take a molex connection to 2 or 3 SATA connections.  Just head to there site and do a search for Molex to SATA cable.

 

I thought I'd read somewhere that one should use molex splitters because it caused problems. Glad to see it can actually be done.

 

thanks,

del

This is also a good reason to use those 4-in-3 or 5-in-3 hotswap bays (even though unRAID does not support hot-swap).  Check out the IcyDock 4-in-3 bay here, zoom in on the back of the dock.  It uses two regular 4-pin Molex power connections and the SATA data connectors for each drive.  So if you use up your SATA power connectors, maybe start adding drives using one of these 4-in-3 docks and just use your existing 4-pin Molex power connectors.

 

http://www.icydock.com/product/mb674spf.html

I thought I'd read somewhere that one should use molex splitters because it caused problems. Glad to see it can actually be done.

 

thanks,

del

 

If you happen to get a flaky splitter it can be a pain. I have 2 of the adapters set up in my system now that go from the one molex connection to 3 SATA connectors.

I am using some of these:

 

 

Works like a charm! 

Interesting.  I have something similar to that, they are single cables with molex adapters, they just aren't tied in pairs like that.  They came with my 3-in-2 cages, I think.  It is nice having the SATA data and power sockets as one big plug, it makes things a bit easier when you are doing work in the case.  Feels a bit more secure to me as well (standard SATA cables do not feel very secure by comparison - locking are still the best, of course).