B550m SFFPC (ish) unraid help with my terrible idea

Hardware Build a PC
1

So I decided to build an sffpc/unraid build with spare parts I had around.

It’s going to have an mATX b550m motherboard, and a ryzen 3600.
Now the tricky part is that I figured it would be pretty cool to have an extremely small case right next to my router, and use a PCI external SAS card to a hidden box with all the hard drives in it as opposed as having a medium/large case.

Now it sounds silly and it probably is. But I thought it could be a cool project and I have a 300w bronze power supply laying around.

The idea is that the server would have its own 300w psu, and the box with drives would have yet another 300w psu powering the drives.

Questions are:

Can I have a different power supply power my hard drives?
How much can you split a single SATA power cable? Unfortunately, this PSU has only 2 SATA power outlets. Could I safely split each one into four?

2

Yes.

I have a 4 x 3.5" drive sata port multiplier box with it’s own power supply (round 4 pin connector, I guess 5v and 12v). Also, if you remember back in the day, folks were using those external esata hard drives that had their own power supply.

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In theory, you can. In practice, it depends on how much power your drives will need to operate. SSD’s are advantageous in this case.

But the problem might be getting the disk PSU to start, if using a standard ATX PSU. It needs circuitry to instigate and sustain power delivery as well as a minimum power consumption. You’ll need to look in to that.

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