I just saw an article about creating small SATA cables, and it got me thinking about various techniques to tidy up SATA cables. If I've got numerous cables running in the same direction, would it be possible to combine the cables into a multicore cable to tidy things up. I've tried to draw up an image in Photoshop to explain what I mean: Click to view larger image. Does anyone have any experience doing anything like this or shortening/modding SATA cables? It would have the benefit of being able to pull out the 3 HDDs in a HDD cage and only having to take out one plug.
Will work but only if all the leads remain seperate, otherwise the data would be destroyed. And as of now, i´d say the datacables for sata are small enough to not be a big nuisance, Best for what you want would be an internal harddrive caddy that uses a backplane. Tho i can hardly think of fiddling with drives to the point of needing to swap 3 at the same time... What you want is proper cable-management, mine is far from the best but it does the trick and hinders near as makes no diffrence in the airflow and yes i still use 1 old ide disk, so sue me
http://www.lian-li.com/v2/en/product/product06.php?pr_index=405&cl_index=2&sc_index=10&ss_index=19 - May be an option? Technically it is possible, it's just electical wiring in the end. I'm looking into this myself, but not for SATA cables. I'm hoping to move my Scythe 5.25" Fan Controller to an external enclosure. I will need to combine the temp / fan wires into a single cable for this. I have to worry about signal loss tho', probe wires are only ~50cm at the moment, I would need to extend this to 1.5 - 2m! I believe SATA cables contain 7 individual lines, three of which are grounds. So for three HDDs, safest route would be a 21 wire cable, you could look into combining the grounds (?!) to reduce this... Good Luck! SouperAndy
Sorry if my image wasn't clear, the data cores would remain separate. I considered buying a couple of caddies, but would rather build my own. Do you know if its possible to buy SATA Backplanes on their own?
Thanks for the link, could be very useful. It would still require me to unplug 4 plugs though when removing a custom HDD cage which is what I'm trying to avoid.
http://www.ami.com/products/subpage.cfm?CatID=14&SubID=19 - Backplanes are available, not sure how easy to get hold of though... Alternatively, buy a cheap drive cage from eBay and dismantle? Have you looked into the port multiplier spec of SATA? May be a way to use this to your advantage? Cheers, SouperAndy
Hmm... I might try and contact a manufacturer, see what their minimum order is (I could probably use my dads company to make it seem more official, even though his company has nothing to do with computers ). I've considered buying a couple of caddies off of eBay, but it's difficult to find any specs of the backplane so it's always a bit of a gamble I've heard of the SATA port multipliers, but hadn't really thought of using them for this situation... might try and do some more brainstorming
Hope I can help I've been dealing with a similar issue for quite some time Backplanes are expensive as f*ck Those are $35 each!!! just for a simple circuit board Don't use a port multiplier, it will make the enclosure slower than slow due to bandwidth issues And if you want to do an exturnal enclosure with one data cable try looking at Infiniband. It turns 4 SATA connections into one at one side, then at the other side it turns it back into 4 SATA connections so no lost of bandwidth. But it does cost quite a bit, $70 for 6' of Infiniband, $30 for a 80mm SCSI bracket and $30 for a PCI bracket But Infiniband doesn't supply power
Have you got a Hi-res version of that? It looks suspiciously like it's using just 2 Data lines, and 2 Power lines on that PCB. If that's the case, it's a piece of piss to make them up. Even a beginners etch pack from maplin can do that with ease.
You could use one of these and just not deal with the cables. http://www.amazon.com/iStarUSA-BPU-...?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1273922573&sr=8-30
Look up SFF-8087. The should also be adapters to go from that plug to individual SATA ports. I have seen the individual circuit boards for a variety of sources, and you should be able to get them for less than $35. You could also see about getting cables that have the power and data connector on one plug then mod them to your needs.
http://www.performance-pcs.com/catalog/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=26160 35$, three HDDs. Worth consideration?
