It feels sketchy to connect 15-20 drives to this and I really don’t want to burn my house down while I am at work. The only reason I am even considering this is that it does not seem to convert voltages and I don’t have to buy completely overblown PSUs and throw my current stuff into the closet.
Also pls tell me if you have any other suggestion.
We got a healthy amount of 3.3v and 5v pins + two 12v pins.
If you’re not daisy chaining & fully loading all the molex connectors? I’m actually going to argue likely fine. There is a caveat here though - what is your powersupply? What is the max wattage on your power supply? What is the max wattage on the 3.3v, 5v, and 12v rails individually on your power supply? How much amperage & on what rails do your hard drives expect at max load (likely spin-up).
I have in the past crimped my own wires to uhh… make full use of available plugs on my powersupplies. This isn’t something I’d recommend unless you’re good with a multimeter, know the amperage limits of each wire, connector, and device (all three at both ends) + are willing to run the risk of magic smoke if you make a mistake.
These kind of connectors do the same thing as I did with a bunch of wire & some crimps, but take some amount of guess work out of it. Would I trust it? Sure.
…Would I trust it on my NAS? Not unless I had backups & everything measured personally.
Edit: I think this is the point where you start investing into drive cages that come with their own power supplies if you want to sleep soundly at night. Either that, or buy this thing, a multimeter, learn Ohm’s law (optional), and personally validate the load.
Honestly crimping my own connectors is something I have been thinking about for a long time.
Probably much better solution, I would also be able to use the 4-8pins
That said I have basically zero experience. How difficult is it?
With good crimps, good wire, and good pins? I’d argue 3/10 on the difficulty scale. If you’re trying to make it actually look beautiful & not have weird folds, bends, different wire lengths, etc. etc.? 9/10 on the difficulty scale.
Make sure your pins are designed for the awg of the wire you’re using.
Quadruple check each pinout, from both sides, then validate with a multimeter after you’ve made your wire before connecting anything.
Make sure you understand the limits on all applicable rails of your PSU, amperage limits on each wire, pin, and connector, as well as the max load of each & every device you’re going to be connecting.
Mind you, buying decent quality tools & materials for this, as a 1-time project, will likely outweigh the cost of buying a third PSU or a quality used drive cage.
**Edit: I’m assuming that you have no experience with the actual crimping part; I am assuming that you understand:
Voltage, wattage, amperage
How to google & read a pin-out diagram
How to use a multimeter to check these things/make your own diagrams
How to read the specifications for voltage/wattage/amperage for your psu/wires/connectors/pins/devices you will be connecting
How to follow previously mentioned specifications
If you don’t have any experience with the above, but are willing to learn - I’d say innitially a 7/10, afterwards back to 3/10.
Call me lazy but I’d start shopping drive cages. Dell or HP probably has some nice just-storage boxes to house, power and cool all that metal. Stackable, preferably.
Other than that, I’d try to find a local makerspace and bribe a soldering ninja to wire up whatever kind of Medusa you need.
If you are buying a new power supply to power 20 drives, then purchase one that fulfills the amperage and number of power connectors.
Use one of these type jumpers or just jumper it yourself, easy to do, connect pins on the 24 (20) pin connector 16 (14) and 17 (15). You could even wire up an ON/OFF switch.
I would not use that board you listed to power any equipment except possibly fans.
Realistically, Joe is 100% correct. Spec’ing power delivery & spending an extra few bucks for a proper PSU will be cheaper and safer. You really should do that unless all the caveats I wrote out in previous posts sound like fun instead of:
work
wasted expense on tools/equipment
dangerous risk to your NAS
chance of fire if you do it wrong
I find it fun, but it ain’t actually the best choice.
You made me laugh. But it does sound like something I’d do myself. I bought a crimper just for a small project, but I’ve been using crimpers for almost 50 years. What amazes me are some of the new crimpers out there for special types of connectors. One I had to waste a handful of pins before I figured out the proper way to do it. Orientation is everything.
My recommendation is also to buy a new PSU.
I dont really know the total need for power, but I bought this PSU last year: Corsair RM1000e (2023) Fully Modular Low Noise ATX Power Supply
It is currently 129 EUR in Germany.
If you dont have a power hog GPU in your system this 1000W will be more than enough for 40 drives. ( they usually draw abouit 400W when start up and way less, when they run)
Also but some 5 way sATA power cable splitters.
They are in the sub 10 EUR price range.
You need 4 for the additional new drives.
THis together will keep your costs under 170EUR and this setup will not be Janky (I hope, I spelled it correctly) at all!
Not sure if my math is correct. Could somebody pls provide an example how many HDDs on a single cable I can connect to the system power 9 with sata/molex splitter? And assuming only Toshibas MG10ACA20TE
I can’t figure out how much amps it will pull from the 12V and 5V lines (how it’s split)
BeQuiet! seems not particularly proud of the System Power 9 series & I can’t find their official spec sheet (or the product at all) on their site, but from some random site I found:
Max output current (+12V1):
28 A
Max output current (+12V2):
22 A
Max output current (+3.3V):
24 A
Max output current (+5V):
15 A
Max output current (+5Vsb):
3 A
Max output current (-12V):
0.3 A
So 15amps of 5v is all you get, or 75w. If this is powering NOTHING but HDDs; I’d argue at 15 is a safe bet - realistically, it could likely push more depending on voltage stability.
As far as 12v goes, you’re fine (12v being used to spin the drives). I’m focusing on 5v because that powers the controllers on the HDDs & I’m assuming worst case it’ll be ~5w (1amp) of 5v (Toshiba says ~8w in use… makes no mention of the split between 12v and 5v). I’m likely being too conservative, but voltage drop could start becoming a problem before amperage limits & fire hazards, and voltage drop on the controller can cause drives to not work properly.
I had a long thing typed out quoting Toshiba & Molex, amperage limits on pins, plugs, etc. and it got to the point where I didn’t know how to organize it into something useful instead of an info dump. I hope this is a good enough, conservative estimate.
**Oh right, you asked about ‘single cable’. I instead answered for the entire PSU…
I’m again going to shorten my answer; otherwise it turns into an info dump:
I think your PSU comes with like… 3 plugs on the side of it - it would make more sense to have 3 wires with 5 plugs each if you’re making them yourself.
Do NOT use some stupid adapter that turns 1 sata power plug into 2 sata power plugs. Sata Power pins are rated for 1.5 amps each (3 pins per rail per plug).
Considering the 18AWG should support around 15A depending on the temperature and a Sata connector supports 54W it should be save to extend one sata cable with 4 plugs to 12plugs (3 evenly split) as long the 5V rail of the PSU is powerfull enough?
You could make 1 short, hard to use wire with 15 sata power plugs & technically be in spec. (to clarify, each plug would be directly connected to the wire, not split)
I wouldn’t split any of the sata power plugs because each pin on the plug is rated for ~1.5 amps. You could split each plug into two & get away with 2 HDDs per plug… I just wouldn’t because we live in the real world where poor contact/corrosion is a killer.
We’re also not accounting for voltage drop in this hypothetical - which is also a real life concern.
Further Edits: Next thing you might think is ‘oh, but with the specs in mind I can use a Molex to Sata adapter & it should honestly be perfectly fine’. Yes, it should, but then we wouldn’t have the magical phrase:
Molex to Sata, lose all your data
Google it at your own tolerance of hardware gore. This is usually due to molex to sata adapters being hot garbage in terms of manufacturing than the numbers
Those are generally much better looking than the ones I’ve seen - if I did have to trust one of those that I didn’t make myself, I guess one made by a PSU manufacturer (Silverstone in this example) would be top of the list.
