SATA Power cables - cable management

Hardware Build a PC
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Hi all,

So here I am trying to fill up the drive slots in the Define 7 XL case. As you can see on the picture, I need longer SAS cables - those are in the mail. Easy fix.

But I have no idea how to manage the SATA power cables. I’ve been googling and searching but have not found any decent solutions for my case. Any idea where I can find a power cable with connectors that are closer together, so I don’t have those huge loops? And maybe more than 4 per cable so I can run 1 cable for 8 drives?

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

drives
drives3024×4032 4.38 MB

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Get some suitable Molex and SATA connectors, a number of brass rods and solder up your own solution :slight_smile: Or a decent backplane with the correct spacing. Or use Kicad to create your own backplane :wink:

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It might be an ugly solution, but have you considered interleaving the power connectors?

so two 4- headed power cable, use one to power drives 0,2,4 and the other 4- ended cable to power drives 1,3,5?

Or would the twisting of the overlap stand out further than the bulge of the sequential connection?

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You want something like this?

image
image800×800 90 KB

I think FSP power supplies come with those stock. They are a but tricky to find though…

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Sata power cables are rated for a max of 75 watts, and 3.5" hard drives can suck up to 15 watts (if you get really bad ones). I wouldn’t recommend extending a single to 8x unless they were going to all SATA based SSDs.

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Thanks, awesome ideas! I’ll try again and see if it’s any better if I interleave, might be less stress on the connections for now.

I really like the backplane idea and I did fine one backplane that might physically fit, though I have no idea how to power it - HP Proliant DL580 G5 SAS Hard Drive Backplane Board 449420-001 - and someone who DIY’d it for R3 - something I could start with and modify to my needs - SATA backplane for Fractal Design Define R3.

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Good to know! I think the drives drink about 11-12W of juice during R/W usage, so 2x4 it is.

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Found it on Newegg but it’s shipping from China, I’ll see if I can find it somewhere closer. Looks way better than my cables. Thanks!

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Could be doable if the drives are spun up in sequence and not simultaneously. Regular hard drives don’t consume more than 5-6w while reading/writing (more if 7200 rpm or faster). They do spike up a lot higher when starting from idle.

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HP ProLiant
Dell Genuine

That’s gotta be a quality product being qualified by both :+1:

Anyway, that thing has 4 SATA connects and an 8-pin (probably PCIe) connector, so that seems plenty for power? a 10-pin, not sure what that is though. Probably some proprietary connector from HP or Dell (whatever company this actually belongs to lol).

That said, 2 things: 1) I don’t see any data connectors on that so I’m not sure how that’s supposed to work and 2) the drive spacing in consumer cases isn’t necessarily the same as on a backplane meant for servers.

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I know, it’s a funny one:) Yeah, no clue how to power it, haven’t found any specs how that 10 pin is supposed to be wired. It connects to the motherboard.

I assumed those are two SFF-8484 types that I would plug into my 2 port sas controller, for the data part.

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