I need an explaination please..

E

Erland

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 13, 2002
Messages
275
You see I saw something the other day that I have been wondering about.

I was hooking up my new SATA drives into my computer and I pulled out what I thought was a 4-pin molex to Dual SATA power connectors. Well when I went to go plug it in I found that the 4 pin connector was the wrong connector, it's the male instead of the female. It's the same connector that is on the PSU, I couldn't plug it in... WTF?

What is this cable for?

This is what I thought it was.

This is driving me crazy, I just went through Newegg and cannot even find this cable anywhere.

I also have a SATA > eSATA cable that I attempted to use to hook these drives up...till I realized that one end was eSATA and I have no eSATA spots on the computer.

Here are some pictures..Click for higher resolution.









Also I now have 3x300GB + 1x320GB

Should I do RAID5 with the 3x300GB and keep the 320GB for backup?

or

Should I do RAID5 with 4x300GB?

What If I had the 3x300GB and later on, once I have data on the RAID5, can I just come in and add the 320GB or another 300GB later?

While I'm at it.... What's a good program or two to test hard drive speeds?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
No I did not pull it from my computer... a friend gave it to me thinking that it was what I had in the link above. I went to use it and found it has no way to hook up power...

As for the link you gave it has the same connector that the power cable has but the other end has 2 SATA power connectors..
 
Thats a dual ESATA power lead.
If you have ESATA port(s) on the back of your PC, there will be ports for at least one drive and its power connector.
The power connector is where that lead plugs in and feeds to the power connections of standard SATA drives.

It makes sense to have 2 leads running from the one socket as my ESATA backplate has 2 drive connections and only one power socket.
Sadly I have a single power lead so can only plug 1 drive in.

fyi: the backplate adds SATA and power ports to the back of the PC, straight from the motherboard/PSU.
 
Erland said:
  1. Should I do RAID5 with the 3x300GB and keep the 320GB for backup?
  2. Should I do RAID5 with 4x300GB?
  3. What If I had the 3x300GB and later on, once I have data on the RAID5, can I just come in and add the 320GB or another 300GB later?
  4. While I'm at it.... What's a good program or two to test hard drive speeds?
Click to expand...

1 -2) Depends on how much storage you need right away
3) Depends on the RAID controller you have. Assuming that your RAID controller supports OCE, then yes you can go and slap in another 320GB or 300GB drive later on.
4) HD Tune, HDTach, Atto are pretty good apps to test HDD speeds.
 
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