Too many hard drives, not enough molex connectors? Sure you can user splitters,
but there is a limit to the number of drives a single consumer grade power supply
will handle without causing power issues on the motherboard. I encountered this
problem on an old dual PIII450 machine. The 300w power supply just couldnt handle
more than 3 drives with all the load of the server board and peripherals in
it.



Solution: add a second power supply. Now it’s pretty darn easy to do, but you
can make it look ugly very easily as well. The last thing I wanted was another
full size ATX brick taking up space and putting out 300w+ of heat when all I
needed was enough power to run a few more hard drives. So instead I used the
mini psu from my trusty flexATX case and mounted is in the front of

case just under the drive bays.


Then I ran a power cable through a small cutout around to the outlet. It ran
through the back panel of the case, very important so that I could fit the side
panel back on without any modifications. Also I jumpered the drive to be permanently
on using a short wire with two male pins attached. This ensured good contact
and prevented any possibility of the jumper falling out. I found a very good
example photo over at dansdata.com:







Gives you the basic idea of the pins to be jumpered. They are the power_on (pin
14) and a ground (pins 3, 5, 7, 13, 15, 16, or 17) usually pin 17 is preferred.



Put everything together, ran a multimeter on it (never forget to do this!) and
plugged everything in.