Hi (again!)... In the quest to finally have a clutter free case I thought I'd ask your advice. I'm just tidying the cables on a new build and I'll be running 3 Spinpoint F3's and an optical drive - I also have a Corsair modular HX 850 PSU: I thought I would connect two sata power cables to the PSU and connect two drives per cable. My question is how many drives can you power off the sata power cables safely? http://www.corsair.com/products/hx850/default.aspx Thanks... Q.
Many times over, in fact. Hard drives draw very little power and an 850W PSU should be able to handle quite a bit on each of the modular bits.
Well, each SATA power cable for the HX850 has 4 sata power connectors so... 4. You'd probably be okay to use extensions and such if you had to, though one cable to HDDs and one to the optical bays at the top do it for me.
Once upon a time with the old SCSI drives having an array's worth of them spinning up at the same time was an issue, but not any more.
It depends on how many rails you have (dunno for the HX 850) so if the overall max amount of recommended drives was 30 and had two power rails then you could only have 15 (recommended) on one slot. Although I think yours will be one rail and so only need to use one cable.
A hard drive will usually draw 2A (from the 12v rail) when it spins up (that's only about a couple of seconds, when you turn on the computer) and much less afterwards. So multiply 2A by the number of HDDs you have and then compare with what your PSU can deliver on a single cable.
It means I have 3 drives running off 1 cable with no problems. I guess it is not quite as informative as the other posts but I thought it might help.
