Adding additional power

[BarkingGhostar]

Morning All,

I typically have been buy the Antec Sonata cases and while the included power supply is fine for low mixture of PATA and SATA devices, it has its shortcomings when needing more than 4 SATA power connectors.

While I hesitate to use an adapter to scavenge a PATA power connector for a SATA device (can I do this?), I wonder how one would go about adding a second power supply to an existing system to just power hard drives.

I know some cases are designed with dual power supplies and can easily feed 8 or more SATA drives plus some other devices (optical, et al), but I would not know how to retrofit to my existing system.

Should I just go with any legit PATA-->SATA power adapter? I wouldn't want to over-burden the lonely original power supply by doing this. This one PC has 7 hard drives already (six in three pairs of RAID 1) plus the optical being handled by one Antec 500W supply already.

 

[Zap]

Should I just go with any legit PATA-->SATA power adapter? I wouldn't want to over-burden the lonely original power supply by doing this. This one PC has 7 hard drives already (six in three pairs of RAID 1) plus the optical being handled by one Antec 500W supply already.

Yes, just use adapters. Most motherboards come with them and you should be able to find them for cheap, including ones that split into multiple. The included EA500 power supply is pretty decent and unless you have a monster video card in there, it should easily power 8+ drives.