I recently purchased a Sliger CX4712 10-bay NAS. Very happy with the physical construction, however I’m having trouble with the hot-swap capabilities. When I plug in a hard drive, it forces the adjacent drives to power down: something like ada 5 attached → ada 3,5,7 detached → ada 3,5,7 attached. The 10 bays are powered with two 5-way power splitter, provided with the case, that look like these, and a Seasonic PRIME PX-750.
The closest example of this problem I can find is from a 45 Drives informational video, where they state that
the five-volt line can suck in a lot of current to fill a couple of capacitors on them when initially plugged in. When these are on the same power leg of the power harness, this can actually droop your voltage a little bit. And what this means, unfortunately, is adjacent drives can sometimes be affected by that just enough that it triggers their power on reset and they drop out and come back instantly.
so, apparently, this is an issue with direct wired backplanes and to be expected. I suppose I will have to power down - or at least export my zpools - to replace drives in the mean time.
This is an apparently niche problem, but I figure I would reach out and ask - has anyone had this issue and found a resolution for it?
I have a PC Pit Stop 15 bay, a Net App 24 bay, and a SuperMicro 36 bay and haven’t had any issues like this in any of my enclosures
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You could try upgrading your PSU to one that has a beefier 5V rail. Or if it’s already maxed (I don’t think there are any on the market that go much above 20A) you could look around on retro forums, olden PCs used 5V a lot more and i’m pretty sure going north of 30A would be a piece of cake with something from 15 years ago.
Alternatively, try one of these:
It says it’s a “load balancer” but it’s nothing of the sort. It takes 12V in the form of a standard 8-pin ATX VGA plug like your motherboard or video card would and spits out down-converted 5V through standard SATA/PERIF modular PSU connectors. You also get 12V passthrough; I am not sure how/if 3V is handled but who needs 3V anyway.
I bought a couple of these thinking my PSU might be in trouble with the 20 5v SSDs it’s asked to handle, but no signs of actual need arose yet. I did open one up and inside the nice (pretty much airtight) plastic case is a nice PCB with a large heatsink, as you’d expect from something asked to dissipate 5-10W of heat passively. I am not sure if:
a) Corsair is trying to burn my house down
b) They sold me a 100% efficiency 12V-5V converter and the heatsink is just for lulz
c) I have no idea how electricity actually works
Anyway, to be on the safe side, I’d find a way to mount it without the plastic enclosure, which is tricky because the PCB is attached to the top of the plastic case, not the bottom where the external mounting holes that fit a 3.5" drive bay are. You can print something, or get creative.
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I didn’t have this problem in my other case, the Silverstone DS380, but alas I am past the return window on the sliger. I can go back, but I wanted to put all my computers in a movable cabinet (i.e. a rack).
I assumed this would simply not be an issue for a product advertised to do 10 bay hot swap 
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Honestly I would expect a SeaSonic Prime to be able to handle things fine. Seems strange behavior to me. A hard drive usually only draws 1 amp from the 5v rail and .5 amp from the 12v rail, and even quadrupling that for startup current still shouldnt bog the system down from 1 drive starting up. Perhaps the splitter they are using has really small gauge wires and cant handle the current properly?
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I already have 20A 5V and 62A 12V rails on the PX-750, bought it along side the case upgrade a few months ago . My motherboard draws about 50 watts, so theres plenty of head room even with 300 watts of drives at spinup.
That Corsair product is definitely interesting, I wonder if it is pin compatible with my Seasonic?
Could be! I will have to try new sata power cables next.
The input is standard ATX input, same pinout as a video card so you can hook it up to your system no matter what your PSU is. The output is 3x SATA/PERIF/AUX (whatever it’s called) PSU connector, for that you can get SATA or Molex cables from Corsair if you need them, you’ll want the type 4 variety.
Let me know how it goes, especially how hot the thing gets under load, I haven’t put mine to use yet,
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Swapped to the sata power cables provided with the power supply, has the same issue, so it seems to not be the cable 
So, I appear to have narrowed down the problem to a combination of three factors. Noting that
- The Sliger case provides no power protection circuits
- I have two brands of hard drives in this case - Wester Digitial Red (WD) and Iron Wolf Red (IW)
- I am using two separate power cables from the same supply
I noticed that when I hot plug a WD drive, the IW drive will brown out. Conversely, when I hot plug an IW drive the WD drives are unaffected. The WD drives function correctly on the same power cable, and the IW drives function correctly on the same power cable.
My hypothesis is that the IW drives provide power protection limiters, so that they don’t cause dips in adjacent drives, but that the WD drives provide power protection capacitors, so that they can experience lower dips in power without browning out. Because my old case, the Silverstone DS380, provides power protection circuitry this was simply never a problem before. It’s unclear to me how I could verify this.