Question Modding power supply

[kaneelschep]

Hi all.


I have a bit of a weird question.
I recently got an HP dl180 with 12 LFF Sata HD enclosures full of drives.
So I used a flex to cut the computer part from the 2u case. And now I have a simple HD enclosure.

This is normally powered by 2 10pin cables coming from the psu, that basically consist of 5volt, 12 volt. and ground wires.
In massive thickness and a really redundant amount of cables. All to power 12 hds and a sas expander....
Sarcasm sign up..

I want to use the enclosure with my existing nas. Which is simply a normal pc with a sas card in it.
To power this I thought of using the sata/molex power cables from the nas PSU.
I got a 700W cooolermaster modular psu. This has 6 seperate cable strands for sata/molex.

So my question is. As I have 6 seperate strands, can I simply combine a few strands to ensure more amperage and thus safety?
Even though it will probably never pull more than at most 150 watt.
I think a WD 40efrx uses about 5 watt a piece at max. And then a little for the SAS expander.

I know adding parralel conected sources of 12 volt will just still be 12volt, but with the combined Amperage.
But I just thought i ask anyway to be sure.

 

[bill001g]

Not really the recommended thing to be doing but it appears you understand the basics and if you are careful to not mess up it should work. You get the wrong voltages or you get grounds on the wrong pins and you will get the magic white smoke coming out of things.

It should be that simple though. More wires means you can run more amps/watts. It would really depend on the gauge of the wires as to what the exact rating would be but if you use more than you think you will ever need it will be fine.

The only concern would be messy stuff like power supplies that have multiple 12 volt rails. In effect it is as if you have 2 different power supplies so you have to be careful to balance the load to not try to pull more than the rated power from one rail.

 

[kaneelschep]

So i soldered 4 sata strands of cables to the 2 10pin plugs to power the hd part of the dl180.
And it works perfectly.
The entire enclosure with 8 drives in it uses about 50 watt. So even with all 12 drives in it, it wont ever put a big strain on the psu or cables anyway.

The 2 10pin plugs are very very overengineered in thickness and redundancy. But well. cant blame hp.

 

[--SID--]

700W cooolermaster modular psu

Which model exactly? Cooler Master only has a few decent 700w units. The others are very old or very bad.

 

[kaneelschep]

It is indeed quite some older PSU. I remember it moaning quite hard with my overclocked x5650 and gtx680. Though it never gave any issues.

But like I said. It doesnt need to work hard anymore now.
I have a meter in front of it. The entire thing including pc never reaches 200watt.
I am actually thinking of adding another cutup dl180 or such to eliminate the pc itself. As the pc also has HD's in it.
And use some cute little htpc like a prodesk or elitedesk to drive it all.
That way I can stuff it all nicely in some small cabinet.

 

[BFG-9000]

So I used a flex to cut the computer

Not very many Americans are going to recognize that this refers to an angle grinder. As with Kleenex or Xerox this is a case where the brand name over time comes to refer to an entire class of products, but it is kind of strange since FLEX has many products, yet is known more for inventing the modern spiral-bevel drive angle grinder in 1954 rather than inventing the flex-shaft grinder in 1922, way before Dremel or Foredom. Americans already had their own angle grinders for decades by that point even if they were dodgy attachments for circular saws by Louis Lincoln Beach.

I would expect most Americans to only be familiar with the Chinese cordless FLEX models carried at Lowes (Chervon Group bought FLEX in 2013, they also own Skil and Ego) which infuriatingly use incompatible batteries to the German ones. In fact most Americans are much more likely to associate Metabo with angle grinders even though they also make many products--plus even the name is a shortened version of the German word for "drill." The strangest thing is Hikoki is sold here as "Metabo HPT."

Usually those wires are 18AWG and good for 10A each but it does also depend on the terminal connectors, if any (normally you don't see thicker than 18AWG wires because the terminals would still limit the current). With soldering, four should be good to the full 480w the wires are good for.

 

[kaneelschep]

That is interesting. I never thought about the word flex like that. I never even heard of the Flex brand.
Still it is the go to word for angle grinder in Holland. I am Dutch. But also in Hungary, where I live, they use the word flex for angle grinder.
I dont think the Dutch use too many of these kind of brand words. We mostly call things by what they are.
No scotch tape or velcro. No kleenex or xerox.

Funny sidenote. A Winchester is 'a harddisk' in Hungary. And Traffipax the word for roadside speed cameras.

 

[80251]

The whole reason hard drives received the nickname "winchester" is from IBM mainframe lore. The first hard drives were used in mainframes and one of the most popular models of hard drives used in the IBM mainframe world had a removable disk pack as well as a permanent disk pack (i.e. that could not be removed). Each of the disks was 30MiB in size and it was commonly called the 30-30, just like the famous Winchester rifle of the same name.