My Power supply has a sufficient number of SATA power outlets, however they are configured with multiple connectors per cord.  The trouble is that I cannot get them to connect to all the drives very easily, if at all.

 

I have a couple extra cables that have the bigger 4-pin power connectors on them, so I wanted to know if its ok to put on a device like this:

 

 

 

I was going to get 2 of them to power 2 new hard drives.

 

 

Anything that would lead you to say "Don't do it!" ? 

 

Thanks

My Power supply has a sufficient number of SATA power outlets, however they are configured with multiple connectors per cord.  The trouble is that I cannot get them to connect to all the drives very easily, if at all.

 

I have a couple extra cables that have the bigger 4-pin power connectors on them, so I wanted to know if its ok to put on a device like this:

 

 

 

I was going to get 2 of them to power 2 new hard drives.

 

 

Anything that would lead you to say "Don't do it!" ? 

 

Thanks

It is not a problem IF the power supply rail feeding the connectors is up to it based on the number of drives you have installed.

 

If you have a single 12V rail power supply, you probably do not need to worry.  If you have a multiple rail power supply you do.

 

As an example, I just today received a 600 Watt power supply.  It is a 4 rail supply.

 

Each rail is rated for 18 Amps and the supply will shut itself down if more than 20.5 is drawn.

(each rail has built-in over-current protection)

 

Rail 1 is dedicated to CPU1   

Rail 2 is dedicated to CPU2  (my new MB is dual CPU, so both connectors will be used)

 

Rail 3 is dedicated to the PCIe connectors for power hungry video cards

  (but an unRAID server does not have those, so that rail is wasted)

 

Rail 4 is for all the molex and sata connectors feeding everything else.

 

Even though I have a 600 Watt supply, only a bit over 200 watts is available from the one rail I can use for disk drives.  Putting it another way, since drives can easily draw 2 amps or more when spinning up, to put more than 8 drives on that one rail is asking for trouble.

 

It is not an issue, since I plan on putting the new power supply into my old MD1200 unRAID array and it currently has dual 300 watt supplies.  One of those will remain and I'll pair it with the new 600 Watt supply.  I'm only going to be powering 6 or 7 disks with the new power supply so I'm within safe limits.  The other existing 300 Watt supply will handle the remaining disks in the cabinet.

 

So... the answer to your question is...

 

  maybe it is OK... as long as your power supply is up to it.    If I tried to run a 20 disk array on my new multi-rail 600 Watt supply, odds are high it would have all kinds of problems if it even could keep from shutting itself down.

 

Joe L.

Follow up question Joe:

 

Lets say your power supply is all one rail (or the sata/molex rail is huge), does it make any difference to use one these instead of one of the above?

 

 

Thanks for the detailed reply Joe

 

When I was initially picking the components for my server, I went with a Corsair 750W, single rail, Power Supply ( I figured it would be easier for power management as I don't have to think about what device is on which power line ).

 

My server has onboard video, no optical drives and 6 Hard drives.

 

The second image posted by poofyhairguy would also be useful for me as I was looking at getting a couple of the other adapters.

 

 

Follow up question Joe:

 

Lets say your power supply is all one rail (or the sata/molex rail is huge), does it make any difference to use one these instead of one of the above?

 

 

Electrically identical, probably more expensive, but nice if you need to expand later (again, if your power supply is up to it)

I have four of these for 13 hard drives and they work great ...

 

I put one on each set of molex strands comming out of my power supply ...

 

everything seems stable ...

 

The "One Molex to 4 SATA" above is a higher quality adapter but if the Molex side fails for some reasons you are going to lose power for up to 4 HD at the same time...

Personally I use the single Molex to SATA power latching version as this one:

 

 

Follow up question Joe:

 

Lets say your power supply is all one rail (or the sata/molex rail is huge), does it make any difference to use one these instead of one of the above?

 

 

 

This is probably a dumb question, but where does a person buy a molex to sata adapter such as this one? I could use a few..

 

Thanks

This is probably a dumb question, but where does a person buy a molex to sata adapter such as this one? I could use a few..

 

Thanks

 

Monoprice.com

Click here - 4 Connections

 

Click here - 3 Connections

 

Click here - 2 Connections

 

I just happen to be looking at them.

Thanks, for the replies. I'll take a look. 

Thanks also.

 

I forgot about Monoprice .  I'm in Canada, however many of us still shop there as the shipping is reasonable, prices are good and quality is great.

 

Total for 2 of the 4 connector version, shipped to Canada - $9.01