Seasonic - modular PCIe cable to SATA, is it possible?

[fleshconsumed]

I own Seasonic G550 power supply in my NAS box. It's a great power supply, but it only comes with four 6-pin plugs for peripherals. Four plugs mean I'm limited to 16 drives unless I go server case with backplanes for power delivery which I do not want to do.

I'm not at the 16 drives yet, but I did start to wonder what would I have to do if I ever needed more than 16 drives. One option would be to go server case with hard drive backplane which I do not want to do. Another option would be to get bigger power supply with five 6-pin peripheral plugs. And the last, purely theoretical option at this point would be to make my own SATA cables that terminate in PCIe plugs on the power supply that will never be used in my NAS box. moddiy sells modular connectors and I can get sata cables for seasonic power supply, all I'd need to do is to reterminate sata cables with PCIe modular connectors. Does anyone know if it's possible to reterminate Seasonic 6 pin power cable into PCIe modular plug? Is it electrically possible?

EDIT: Well, upon further research I don't think it's possible. The PCIe modular connectors only provide 12V, they do not provide 5v and 3.3v that will be necessary for hard drives. Shucks.

 

[Lordhumungus]

I'm an idiot, ignore me.

 

[Rifter]

does PSU have a molex cable? if so then id get one of these to give you 4 extra drives.

https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=8794

if no molex use this

https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com...394011_1_6?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1492807054&sr=1-6

 

[Seasonic Rep]

I own Seasonic G550 power supply in my NAS box. It's a great power supply, but it only comes with four 6-pin plugs for peripherals. Four plugs mean I'm limited to 16 drives unless I go server case with backplanes for power delivery which I do not want to do.

I'm not at the 16 drives yet, but I did start to wonder what would I have to do if I ever needed more than 16 drives. One option would be to go server case with hard drive backplane which I do not want to do. Another option would be to get bigger power supply with five 6-pin peripheral plugs. And the last, purely theoretical option at this point would be to make my own SATA cables that terminate in PCIe plugs on the power supply that will never be used in my NAS box. moddiy sells modular connectors and I can get sata cables for seasonic power supply, all I'd need to do is to reterminate sata cables with PCIe modular connectors. Does anyone know if it's possible to reterminate Seasonic 6 pin power cable into PCIe modular plug? Is it electrically possible?

EDIT: Well, upon further research I don't think it's possible. The PCIe modular connectors only provide 12V, they do not provide 5v and 3.3v that will be necessary for hard drives. Shucks.

Hello,

Thank you for your message.
As you said, it's not possible to modify PCI-E cable to make them SATA. However, if you are not using any other peripheral cable, you have by default 4 peripheral connectors on your PSU. It means that you can use up to 16 HDD's by using 4 SATA cables with 4 connectors each. If you want extra cable and depending where you are living, we can maybe help you to find them. For this, kindly contact us and we will answer as soon as possible.

Thank you.
Best Regards,

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Am I missing something? How big would the PSU need be to run 16 drives and a general profile of ATX hardware? Maybe depends on how old the disks, whether they be HDD 3.5, 2.5 or SSD.

 

[Valantar]

Am I missing something? How big would the PSU need be to run 16 drives and a general profile of ATX hardware? Maybe depends on how old the disks, whether they be HDD 3.5, 2.5 or SSD.

Yeah, 16 3.5" drives spinning up would overload a 550W PSU easily. Don't 3.5" drives pull 30-35W each during spin-up? At that point, a PSU upgrade would be in order anyhow.

As for the question more as a theoretical exercise: you could make a pure 12V "SATA cable" (i.e. missing the 5V and 3.3V lines) from a PCIe connector, but that would depend on the voltages required by your drives. IIRC most 3.5" drives run their motors off 12V, but I can't remember if they use 5V or 3.3V for controllers and the like. I wouldn't be surprised. If so, it wouldn't work. A better plan would be to make new SATA power cables that connect to the peripheral connectors with a larger wire gauge and more connectors, but again, you wouldn't want to run 16 drives off that PSU anyhow.

edit: I took a look at a 3.5" drive I had lying around, and yes, it uses both 5V and 12V. As such, the PCIe->SATA idea is a no-go.

 

[Interitus]

Not sure if this would help you or not, but if you have the cable length to reach more than just four drives and you're careful about the amp load on each run, you can do something like I have done in the past to customize the appearance of drive power runs. This run originally only had 2 SATA plugs on it.

You can get the connectors at places like FrozenCPU for fairly cheap. They're fairly easy to install and don't require any cutting. They just splice into the existing wire.

http://www.frozencpu.com/products/1...rimp_Connector_-_Black_-_90_M-SCA-16F-BK.html

 

[Valantar]

Not sure if this would help you or not, but if you have the cable length to reach more than just four drives and you're careful about the amp load on each run, you can do something like I have done in the past to customize the appearance of drive power runs. This run originally only had 2 SATA plugs on it.

You can get the connectors at places like FrozenCPU for fairly cheap. They're fairly easy to install and don't require any cutting. They just splice into the existing wire.

http://www.frozencpu.com/products/1...rimp_Connector_-_Black_-_90_M-SCA-16F-BK.html

Pretty much what I suggested, although running more than 16 3.5" drives off a 550W PSU is risky at best. Also, didn't FrozenCPU go out of business rather spectacularly a year or two ago?

 

[fleshconsumed]

does PSU have a molex cable? if so then id get one of these to give you 4 extra drives.

https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=8794

if no molex use this

https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com...394011_1_6?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1492807054&sr=1-6

I've been burned by using 4x splitters like these before. Sadly they simply do not work when all drives are being accessed at once. I would get a whole bunch of hard drive and hard drive controller time out errors when running verify commands on my NAS which involves reading/verifying data from all hard drives at once. Using molex to two SATA drives solved the problem - zero issues whatsoever, but as you can imagine, it created a jumbled mess of wires.

Yeah, 16 3.5" drives spinning up would overload a 550W PSU easily. Don't 3.5" drives pull 30-35W each during spin-up? At that point, a PSU upgrade would be in order anyhow.

I'm pretty confident that 550W should be plenty for 16 spinners. I've run my current setup of 12 spinners and 2 SSDs with 380W Antec power supply before I got Seasonic G550 and had zero issues spinning up. I'm very well aware that hard drives take more juice spinning up, but so far I've found that people vastly overestimate the necessary amount of power they actually need.

Not sure if this would help you or not, but if you have the cable length to reach more than just four drives and you're careful about the amp load on each run, you can do something like I have done in the past to customize the appearance of drive power runs. This run originally only had 2 SATA plugs on it.


You can get the connectors at places like FrozenCPU for fairly cheap. They're fairly easy to install and don't require any cutting. They just splice into the existing wire.

http://www.frozencpu.com/products/1...rimp_Connector_-_Black_-_90_M-SCA-16F-BK.html

I may have to go that way, but at that point I think it'd be easier to just buy 660XP2 for five peripheral plugs. I think I'll seriously need to look again at my life priorities if I come to a point where I think I need more than 20 drives...