I am currently building a custom build, at the moment I have an SSD for the main OS and a 2TB disk for my data.I wish to add a few more hard drives (about 3-4 more) I have the bays and the PC is more than capable.What I am asking is, what cable do I need in order to do this (i.e. what do I need to search on OKorder)? The kind of cable which turns on SATA port into multiple ones, and then a similar one for power.Regards,Sungmin Kim
You need a RAID card. You can hook up any number of drives depending on the card.
You can only attach one drive to a sata port. You will have to look on your mother board to see if there are any other SATA ports available.
you need a sata cable per drive, most drives (boxed) will come with the cable included. and you'll need a power cable per drive, or an extension power cable as usually it's one big cable split many times. you cannot split the sata cable like the power cable. if your mainboard only features 4 sata ports, that's how many hard drives you can have.
While you can get a port multiplier, there are limitations, as a port multiplier device will only work with a controller that supports the protocol and the throughput is limited as all drives contend (like the bad old days of master/slave in ATA). Adding an extra drive controller would be a better option, if you need more drives than there are SATA ports for. Power splitters are not a problem, as long as the PSU is up to the load
You can't split SATA data cables. If your motherboard has the standard 6 SATA data ports, you can have 5 hard drives, plus one optical drive. If your board has only 4 SATA data ports, you can have 3 hard drives, plus the optical drive. If your motherboard has 10 SATA ports, you can have 9 hard drives, plus the optical drive. (You can always unplug the optical drive and use that port for a hard drive, but you are gonna need that optical drive somewhere down the road :) ~Cindy! :)
