Electrical – Molex to SATA power adapter from a Cooler Master modular PSU

power supplysata

I know this might sound weird at first, but hear me out. I have an old 400W PSU, which I plan on using in my headless server. It won't be anything crazy. One problem: It comes with only two SATA power cables, meaning I can only power two drives (one SSD and one HDD at the moment).

I want to make something like this:

Since I need to power a total of 5 drives. Luckily I have a modular Cooler Master PSU, which comes with some extra cables I don't need. One of those is this:

It has one modular connector at the end and four SATA power plugs, which is exactly what I need. I know the modular connector isn't molex, because it has 5 pins instead of molex' 4 pins. The modular connector looks like this:

Does anyone know if I can wire this up to a molex plug, so I can use the four SATA power plugs? I have a spare female molex laying around I can chop up. I'm not sure how the modular plug is wired and if all 5 are needed (there could be 2 GND for example).

EDIT:

If we assume the upper ones are correct, would this technically be doable just doing this:

I don't need 3.3v as far as I've read.

Best Answer

IT WORKED! This is what I did:

For those trying to do the same: Observe that the sketch I made are female connectors. This means when you go to do your male molex connector, you should flip it around. Pay close attention to that, otherwise you'll be sending 12v into your 5v rail and probably fry your harddrive.

Applied some shrink tube (also on the leftover wire that is 3.3v). Turned on the system after testing with an old spare 2.5" 120GB HDD and voilá, they all showed up after that:

  *-disk
       description: ATA Disk
       product: KINGSTON SV300S3
       physical id: 0.0.0
       bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0
       logical name: /dev/sda
       version: BBF0
       serial: 50026B725307A44E
       size: 55GiB (60GB)
       capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos
       configuration: ansiversion=5 logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=512 signature=118c8db8
  *-disk
       description: ATA Disk
       product: WDC WD10EARS-00Y
       vendor: Western Digital
       physical id: 0.0.0
       bus info: scsi@1:0.0.0
       logical name: /dev/sdb
       version: 0A80
       serial: WD-WCAV5P072200
       size: 931GiB (1TB)
       capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos
       configuration: ansiversion=5 logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=512 signature=000eb003
  *-disk
       description: ATA Disk
       product: WDC WD15EARS-00Z
       vendor: Western Digital
       physical id: 0.0.0
       bus info: scsi@2:0.0.0
       logical name: /dev/sdc
       version: 0A80
       serial: WD-WMAVU1508779
       size: 1397GiB (1500GB)
       capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos
       configuration: ansiversion=5 logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=512 signature=cebcfd2a
  *-disk
       description: ATA Disk
       product: WDC WD10EARS-00Y
       vendor: Western Digital
       physical id: 0.0.0
       bus info: scsi@3:0.0.0
       logical name: /dev/sdd
       version: 0A80
       serial: WD-WCAV5P241367
       size: 931GiB (1TB)
       capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos
       configuration: ansiversion=5 logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=512 signature=00094ed0
  *-disk
       description: ATA Disk
       product: TOSHIBA MQ01ABF0
       vendor: Toshiba
       physical id: 0.0.0
       bus info: scsi@4:0.0.0
       logical name: /dev/sde
       version: 3M
       serial: 84EFC3DXT
       size: 465GiB (500GB)
       capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos
       configuration: ansiversion=5 logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=512 signature=77e39da9