I am trying to build a openmediavault server, and I want it to power about 12 hard drives. I’ve never had to deal with this many connectors before, so perhaps this is a dumb question but how do I add more sata connectors to a PSU? Or can someone point me to a PSU that has 12 sata connectors and is under $100?
CPU: AMD Ryzen 3 3200G 3.6 GHz Quad-Core Processor
Motherboard: Gigabyte B450 I AORUS PRO WIFI Mini ITX AM4 Motherboard
12 Seagate 400 GB hard drives (pulled from an old rack and for free)
8 GB ram
Don’t worry about the psu directly. For a lot of drives I recommend using a backplane, either built in like a disk shelf, or something smaller like the 4 or 5 drive cages.
If you insist on cabling every drive discretely, look at a NAS power cable. 4 or 5 SATA power connectors with a single SATA or Molex input. These have drawbacks too, like the spacing of the connectors.
Like @gordonthree said, you should start looking at a disk shelf with that many drives, but I run 10 in a full ATX case, so it can be done. Kinda basic, but have you picked up any molex to data converters? Also, maybe take a look at a slightly beefier (in terms of rated capacity) then you would typically for a small build, since you’re spinning 12 spindles which can chew up a lot of power.
One problem that may come up, if you haven’t thought of it yet, you need to get SATA (data, not power) to each of those drives. You’ll need a HBA (host bus adapter), but most of the LSI SAS HBAs that I’ve seen only support two SAS connectors, so one card can support 8 drives. And I think that mobo has two SATA ports onboard.
Long story short, since that board only has one PCIe lane and two SATA connectors, Im not sure how you’re going to get SATA to more then 10 drives.
The mobo I am planning on using has 6 sata connections. I figure I can start with that and then use a hba to add another 8 which should be more than enough for OS and ZFS pool
Oh good to go! Sorry I did a quick search on Amazon to see how much sata you were working with, but it looks like I was looking at the wrong board. Sounds like it’ll be a fun build man.