[SOLVED] Setting up 15 hard drives

[2017davidwade]

I have 15x sata 1TB HDDs. I wish to wire up all of them. I had a 350 watt dual 12v rail PSU. I was thinking about using a 24pin dual jumper so when PC comes on the external PSU does. That's easy. My question is this how best to connect 15x Sata cables. Please if possible no need to ask why so many. My answer would be why not.

 

[drtweak]

You need to now how many amps it can put out. That is a LOT of HDDs to power up. The case i bought for my server came with a 350 watt and it couldn't handle a board (25 watts TOTAL including RAM+CPU) and 8 hard drives on power up. Had to get a 450 watt. Now I am consolidating all my stuff into one PC. My now upgraded server with a 4th Gen i5 4570 can't do 4k encoding or well can't keep up. Tested on my AMD FX 8320 and had no issue so moving everything into my HAF-X Case. I had a 600 watt PSU but with a 250 watt GPU + 125 Watt CPU and other thing + what will now be a dozen hard drives, 600 watts wasn't going to cut it. I just bought a HXi1200i for 161 new out the door plus a 20 dollar mail in rebate on newegg. It is overkill yes but plan on upgrading to thread ripper one day so I am going to need that power. I don't think 350 will be enough. I would say 450-500 watts in order to properlly handle the boot up. Once they are running they use like half the power but to first start up those disk would be a pain.

Servers fix this by delayed spinup. Spinning up groups at a time until they are all started THEN the server POST. This is one reason why big servers take so long to boot.

 

[USAFRet]

2 of these, with room to spare:
https://www.amazon.com/Mediasonic-H82-SU3S2-ProBox-External-Enclosure/dp/B005GYDMYG

 

[mdd1963]

Powering them up is one thing....

Do you have an HBA RAID card w/ expander cables to be able to connect to all of them, as most mainboards only have 4-6 SATA ports. (A few expensive Denverton variants have 12-13 ports...

 

[2017davidwade]

My laptop is I core 5 6th gen. 32GB ddr3 2666 512gb ssd. My 2nd system a simple Acer desktop quad core 16gb ddr3 500gb hdd win 10 pro. My plan is power all the hdds in one now with a 700 watt psu sata to 2 sata adaptors over and over. Half on one rail other half ect. Sata data cable 1 to 5 adaptors USB powered 4x 5 =20 drives. It's mostly for mass storage on the cheap. Network using a Cat5 ethernet cable. System to laptop. One x console wifi to laptop stream what I like.

 

[USAFRet]

My laptop is I core 5 6th gen. 32GB ddr3 2666 512gb ssd. My 2nd system a simple Acer desktop quad core 16gb ddr3 500gb hdd win 10 pro. My plan is power all the hdds in one now with a 700 watt psu sata to 2 sata adaptors over and over. Half on one rail other half ect. Sata data cable 1 to 5 adaptors USB powered 4x 5 =20 drives. It's mostly for mass storage on the cheap. Network using a Cat5 ethernet cable. System to laptop. One x console wifi to laptop stream what I like.

As above, SATA power is one thing, SATA data ports is quite another.

 

[cryoburner]

Please if possible no need to ask why so many. My answer would be why not.

In addition to the complexities and additional hardware needed to get such a setup running, another thing to consider might be the cost of electricity, if you want to leave these drives running and accessible 24/7. The roughly 6 watts or so that a hard drive draws at idle isn't much, but with 15 of them combined, that could work out to around $100 a year in electricity (at least at the current average cost of electricity in the US, which might differ in your area). Over the course of 5 years, that might work out to around $500, which is about what it would cost to buy and run a pair of 8GB drives or four 4TB drives. If you wanted to put the 1TB drives to use, they could always be used as backups for the contents of the newer drives and left powered down in a safe location when not in use.

 

[jsmithepa]

I say that's less than 1/4 of a baked idea.

Are these going to be external USB drive then? SATA? you don't sound clear. Either way SATA/USB u can't run long SATA/USB cables for HD, is not designed for long cable runs, end of story.

Real store-bought external storage like NAS got the enclosure and a controller board in it which manage the drive as well as put the whole thing on the LAN so it can be accessed.

Here have no desire to judge your plan, if I tell you is a foolhardy venture am sure you are going to quote me some utube video, see somebody done it!

Good luck.