Anyone have experience building their own internal power cables?

[Ethereal_Dragon]

Now that I have migrated my gaming rig over to an Antec P280, I am not really liking any of the power cables I have.

The PSU I have is a SILVERSTONE ST70F-ES which is FULLY modular, so I a thinking about just building my OWN power cables. As for the actual BUILDING of the cables, I have no doubt that it won't be TOO much of an issue, no problem.

The part I am not quite sure about is figuring out power loads for each connector. Might anyone have any advice as to how to figure out how many HDD's etc. etc. you can connect to each port on the PSU.

At this point, the Antec P280 has 6 internal 3.5" bays, and 2 internal 2.5" bays, so I am thinking of making 2 custom cables with SATA power connectors for the HDD's, 4 connectors each. I am not sure if there are any kinds of requirements for distance between each connector or anything like that, so I am thinking that each cable might connect to every other drive, so they will both basically be the same length. Then, I would have a third cable which would have 3 SATA power connectors for optical drives. The only power connector left would be a molex just above the motherboard I/O plate for the 1 rear and 2 top fans. I would LIKE to include this as a long extension of the optical drive power cable, but like I am unsure of minimum distance between the connectors, I am not sure if there is any length max for these cables.

These are the only sources for parts I have looked at so far, any comments on them?
Connectors - FrozenCPU.com *
Molex Connectors

If anyone has any kind of experience or good links on this kind of subject, feedback would be appreciated!!

Thanks guys!!

 

[Fat.Clown]

I thought about this back when I was thinking about sleeving my cables.

spacing -
this guy had super close spacing in his power cables. so I don't think spacing is an issue.
[Build Log] - The Big Budget Boomer Box (aka, the "BBBB")
another example (scroll down);
Need some help with making sata power cables
guy has 5 hdds running off of 1 cable.

power -
page 2 talks about power consumption
Norco 4020 questions - [H]ard|Forum

detailed guide on making the cables & sleeving. if you aren't sleeving, just skip the sleeving part.
GUIDE - MDPC-X SLeeving of individual Cables! by Kamaster - OverclockersClub Forums


*not sure if you linked correct PSU. the one you linked is not modular. so you may want to look more into the power section. don't track my ip and hunt me down if your computer spews out fire and burns your house down.

 

[PP Mguire]

Be SUPER careful doing this. If you put all your drives on one cable set your bios to do a staggered start up. If you don't get every single cable right you could wind up doing like a friend of mine did and swap ground and 5v on a drive. That makes them smoke.

 

[Ethereal_Dragon]

Hahahaha, WHOOPS!! I got the model number off of a historical purchase at NewEgg, but that was for a friends build, not mine.... Mine is actually the DA700. It is fully modular, all of the cables including the 24 pin and 8 pin power are all modular.

Thank you for the links, checking them out. As for burning down my house, it isn't in the plan at this point, but if it happens, I'm a big boy, I won't hurt you. We have renters insurance. I'll just tell my WIFE that you gave me bad info, hahahha, divert the blame.

As for 'staggered startup', I don't recall hearing that one before, guess I'll look in the BIOS to see what if anything this board can do. Though, I'm not sure how that would help in a case with incorrect wiring...... If you get the wires bad, your BOUND to have issues. I will be taking my time to get it done properly if I do go through with this, so I shouldn't have to worry about that. Thank you though.

 

[PP Mguire]

Staggered start up helps with 12v load off a single line. It spins the drives up individually instead of all at once.