Best power supply for JBOD cage?

[Savage1701]

I have a question on the best power supply for a JBOD cage holding a dozen hard drives. It seems that many power supplies dedicate, at most, one rail for hard drives. I don't want to go down the spinup/MAID/power up on standby road, since about every raid controller out there is different, as are most hard drives and how they react to those commands.

My question is this - if I want a power supply for a JBOD cage, what's my best bet? It seems as though most PS's dedicate much of their output to the PCIe connectors. I have no use for that, obviously. Is there a way one can recover at least one of the rails, such as tapping the 5V and 12V on the 20/24 pin ATX connector and making a custom 4-pin Molex harness off of that?

Can one tap the 12V rails on the PCIe connectors and splice in the 5V supply from the ATX connector to recover some more 12V current capacity? I assume that there is a single 5V rail that feeds everything coming out of the PS since I've never run across a PS with 2X/3X/4X 5V rails. Any thoughts are appreciated. Thank you.

 

[mailpup]

Are you trying to use a lower end powered power supply with limited numbers of connectors? It seems to me you could use adapters to convert unused SATA power connectors to Molex connectors. Of course, you would need a power supply that had enough total connectors (both molex and SATA) to power all those HDDs. Perhaps judicious use of splitters might add a few extra molex connectors needed.

 

[Savage1701]

Well, I'm not sure that's the issue. As I stated in my post above, it seems that most of the rails/current capacity are dedicated to PCIe connectors, since manufacturers (rightly) assume that most users are going for high-end, high-power graphic adapters. At least that's the assumption I am coming away with after reading a bunch of articles on PC power supplies and rails and all that debate.

Having enough connectors is not the issue - I have enough molex splitters and SATA/Molex adapters to open my own electronics company.

I'm more interested in hearing if anyone has any suggestions for using the current available on the MB & PCIe connectors/rails to safely power hard drives and supply enough current for the inrush that occurs on spinup.

 

[DelJo63]

I think you started with the correct question; Good cage for JBOD (or any raid) devices.
The PS would be specialized for the HDs and have nothing superfluous as well as
adequate cooling.

 

[Savage1701]

Yes Joe, but the ones I have seen are nothing special - a 300W PS in the Addonics cage, along with a big whopping price tag. So, I reiterate my question - anyone know of a PS designed for JBOD cages? If not, anyone know how to safely tap the other rails of the PS?

 

[DelJo63]

>If not, anyone know how to safely tap the other rails of the PS?

this is so fraught with issues I would never risk my data with a $.195 solutions.