Old Molex adapters vs new SATA splitters, I picked wrong and cooked a drive

Last month I was rebuilding a NAS for a client in Portland and needed to power 6 drives off a 750W PSU that only had 4 SATA plugs. I had a box of cheap Y-splitter cables from Amazon and a bag of used Molex to SATA adapters from an old shop cleanup. I went with the splitters because they were shinier and newer. Two days later one of the drives started throwing CRC errors and SMART showed reallocated sectors. Fans were fine, temps fine, but the 5V rail on that splitter was sagging under load. Swapped in the Molex adapters with a multimeter check and the voltage held steady. Wish I tested first instead of trusting the packaging. Anyone else have a preference between those two for multi-drive rigs, or do you just replace the PSU?

1 comments

1 Comment

willowr963d ago

You said you "trusted the packaging" but honestly that's not really the issue here. The real problem is you loaded 6 drives on a 750W PSU that wasn't built for that many spin-ups in the first place. Those cheap Y-splitters are fine for a couple of SSDs, not for a NAS full of mechanicals drawing startup current spikes. I've run Molex to SATA for years on older rigs and they're usually solid, but they're not magic either. A multimeter check after the fact doesn't fix the damage that's already done to that drive's sector map. Me, I'd replace the PSU with one that has native ports before I trust any adapter for a client build.