Power To Your Drives

Power To Your Drives

One of the tricks we’ve learned in the Tech MMA labs is that it really pays to plan out how you’re going to use the limited number of power cables in every system. In addition to the two hard drives, there’s also an 8cm fan that needs power right next to these drives.

Now it’s time to power up your drives. In this image, we’re also powering up a fan using the pass through power connector that most case fans ship with. Note that we brought the power cable up between the two drives, where it is virtually invisible.

Our goal was to only run one cable down from the power supply to the front of the case, and power all three of these devices off that cable. Luckily, that’s easy to do. Because the fan includes a pass through, we simply connect one of the leads to the fan’s input and then plug the pass through into the first drive. That leaves the second Molex connector on the power cable available for drive number two.

Now that the power lead from the power supply is connected to the fan, we can use the fan’s power output to power our hard drive.

It’s OK to use splitters and a pass through to put a couple of drives on one power cable, but we wouldn’t go further than that. If you overload one of the lines from the power supply, it can cause system crashing sags under heavy loads.

Rinse and repeat. We used the second Molex connector on the lead from the power supply to supply juice to the second drive.

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