Question Storage HDD suddenly disconnected, can no longer be detected if SATA-powered fans are also plugged in

[Cyber_Akuma]

This is a weird one. So I got a cheap used pre-built that I upgraded a bit to use as a gaming machine until I can get my real one up and running, which would take a while. I noticed that the GPU I had plugged into it was running hot, and found out it was because the GPU was just blasting all of it's hot air on the side panel that has no room or ventilation, so it was just stewing in it's own hot air.

I eventfully made a custom fan solution, with a rear exhaust by the CPU powered by the CPU fan header itself, and side-fans for the GPU that were powered by SATA and take a PWM signal from the lowest front-facing fan, this is what I did:

https://imgur.com/a/hF2S0b5

View: https://imgur.com/a/hF2S0b5


This worked fine for about 1-2 months, then suddenly I got a message from Intel Rapid Storage that my HDD had been disconnected. At first I assumed that it was RSE itself that was causing issues, and I didn't really have a need for it since I am not doing any enterprise level management or using octane, so I uninstalled it.

But it didn't help, when I rebooted the system took an abnormally long time to boot, getting stuck on those rotating circles when Windows boots. Eventually it booted but the HDD was gone, Disk Manager didn't even detect the drive at all unmounted or not. I noticed that when I disconnected the drive Windows would boot near instantly. Worried that the drive was dying I went off to get a backup USB drive (which has been giving me it's own set of disconnection problems for other things...) and made a backup of that drive without an issue.

I tried connecting a spare old 2.5 laptop HDD I had lying around and it worked fine, so thinking that it was a fluke that just needed a reboot (I didn't want to take risks plugging the drive back in without making the backup first) I connecting the drive back up, I had to disconnect the fans as they were in the way and booted the system. It booted instantly and everything seemed fine. So I reconnected the fans and got ready to use the system again... and the drive was missing again.

After some experimentation I eventually realized that the drive would fail to be detected (and Windows would take forever to boot) if the fans were plugged in. Other than taking power from the same set of SATA connectors there is no correlation between the HDD and the fans.

Could these fans really somehow be taking so much power that they are causing the drive to fail when they were just fine before? Or could something have shorted? There is literally just one wire I attached to draw a PWM signal from the case fan to the side fans so I can't imagine that my custom cable is somehow causing a short.

Anyone have any ideas or suggestions about this?

 

[RobertRexter]

Just a wild guess...Is your wattage on the power supply adequate for all these fans? Dell power supplies usually are notoriously under-powered and not of very high quality. I have always had problems with them over the years at my place of work.

 

[faalin]

I would first try removing the PWM wire that you added to the motherboard. This will show if you have a sata power issue or if dell lied and didnt use standard colors for their fan pinout.

The 60mm fans are on .08a or .16A together the 120mm im guessing is a Noctua NF-F12PWM which is only .05A, you're talking around .25A for the 3 fans. Im hoping your not that close on power that that is causing you issues.

 

[Cyber_Akuma]

Just a wild guess...Is your wattage on the power supply adequate for all these fans? Dell power supplies usually are notoriously under-powered and not of very high quality. I have always had problems with them over the years at my place of work.

Definitely, it's a 825 watt PSU. I ran OCCT's power test dozens of times and it had no problem running the Xeon CPU, the RTX 2060 Super, four sticks of RAM, two NVMEs, and all the fans maxed out for extended periods of time. The only component that was not in the system while I was doing all of these tests (Since I was mainly testing the airflow and cooling of the fans in different configurations) was the HDD.

This is a workstation class desktop, not a consumer model.

I would first try removing the PWM wire that you added to the motherboard. This will show if you have a sata power issue or if dell lied and didnt use standard colors for their fan pinout.

The 60mm fans are on .08a or .16A together the 120mm im guessing is a Noctua NF-F12PWM which is only .05A, you're talking around .25A for the 3 fans. Im hoping your not that close on power that that is causing you issues.

They aren't a standard pinout or connector, and one of the wires isn't a standard color either as I showed in the diagrams. I tested which wire does what and looked at pictures of adapter cables to figure out the pinout. I definitely got the PWM wire right since the fans are clearly PWN controlled by the blue wire while the switch is on.

Well, the reason I am not just pulling power from the front fans for the side fans is because the front fans EACH pull 0.95 Amps IIRC. And while I don't know the amperage of the proprietary fan ports the system uses, considering that standard ports are 1 amp, the three front 0.95 Amp fans each have their own dedicated port, and the ports still use the same pins just in a different layout, it's probably safe to assume they are 1 amp as well. So I didn't want to pull power from the front fan headers since I likely only had 0.05 amps of wiggle room, hence why I powered them over SATA. I would have far preferred to power them over the fan header.

I did power the one in the rear of the case from the CPU cooler fan header, but that's because the CPU fan was about 0.60 amps or so, so more than enough wiggle room for that rear 80 mm fan. (HOW does this thing not have at least a rear fan? The entire case was designed to purely rely on three overpowered front case fans for all of it's airflow, there was SO much hot air pooling behind the CPU cooler...)