Sata power

[Halk]

I've a FreeNAS server which has 8 drives in it. Today I was tearing my hair out thinking I had a hardware problem when it seems (touch wood) that it was a dodgy connection/dodgy cable.

I've replaced the 1x molex to 4x sata power cable with a different one and I've not had any problems since.

However it's been something that's annoyed me for all the years I've had this tower case. There's 13 drive bays in total, and the main area has 7. I've not ever seen any sata power cables that will do the main drive area neatly without having tight turns, or lots of cable spare, and usually with the cables slightly pushing the connectors back off.

Is there a better solution than this, does anywhere make good quality custom cables, or is there some kind of trick I can do to get things neat?

The best I've managed is to put 3 of the 7 drives in backwards so that I've got one strip of cables in the front of the bay and 1 in the back of the bay.

 

[joeinaz]

What is the model number of the case? What are you connecting your disk to? Motherboard? HBA?

 

[Halk]

The disks are connected to an LSI HBA by mini-SAS to SATA breakout cables.

It's a Lian Li server case. Here's the drives in the main bay of 7

https://i.imgur.com/WNXhMWX.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/ET34APu.jpg

 

[Ericloewe]

Please post images directly to the forum by copy/pasting them into your posts.

 

[joeschmuck]

Your photos show that you have two four SATA connection cables and they don't look perfect but they do look pretty good. My advice is to "dress" the cables using very small zipties. Bend the cables so the excess folds on top of the cables and pull them tight. Now you could also just make up your own custom cables as well but you would need to be willing to buy the parts and take your time to do it right. You need to leave a little bit of excess cablle between the cable connectors so it's not too tight between drives.

 

[Halk]

Ah... zipties is a good idea. I should be able to effectively reduce the length of the cables with those and get them a bit neater. I did try to make my own cables maybe 10 years ago or so but I wouldn't trust them... they seemed a bit flaky. It's when I put the sides of the case on the cables get moved a little.

I'd happily pay for custom cables but I think the zipties might actually do a good enough job so that the cables can be flush.

 

[joeschmuck]

Yup, the small zipties work very well. Too large of zipties just don't look as good.