Making a power sata cable

machus — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 22:16:37 +0000

So as I was building a new server for my apartment out of an old surplus dell that I had gotten from an auction I realized that in my haste I had forgotten about power to my new sata drive. I had purchased a new pci sata card as the motherboard only had ide connections. So with a search of the apartment discovered that I did not have an existing molex to sata power cable. I did find I had a sata power cable but the molex end was all wrong it being a female end and not a male end.

It was now time to either purchase a pre-made molex to power sata cable or see if around the apartment I could construct something. I found an old dell whose power supply had gone bad but low and behold it had power sata cables, but no male molex connectors. A little more digging and in a disused 486 box I found a cpu fan connector that had a male molex connector on it. I now had all the parts, time to break out the solder iron.

I first tried to solder out the old wires from the power supply and this worked for a couple of the wires, but with the larger groupings of wires my solder iron simply wasn’t powerful enough so out came the wire cutters and I soon had a bunch of wires freed from a PSU. I decided to remove all the wires since the wires seemed to be long enough that I might want to use them in another project.

I cut off the female portion of the cpu fan power cable as well as the two wires leading to the fan it self. After untangling the PSU wires I was left with five wires on the sata cable and 4 wires on the molex cable. Well ain’t this a problem I had an unequal number of wires to try and match up. Now I knew that the black wires were grounds and was safe there and had two of each. One red and one yellow wire matched up just fine but what was I to do with this extra orange wire. A few minutes searching the web I found that the extra orange wire is a 3.3v rail and isn’t actually needed so I was safe.

A few minutes with the solder iron and I had connected the parts together and I now had a molex to sata power cable. Due to cheapness I used black electrical tape to cover my solder joints and not shrink tubing. I also wrapped the wires in tape in a few places to help reduce the clutter. Another item of mention is that I left the unused 3.3v line attached to the sata end and just tapped it up with the other wires, just in case I might ever need this wire.

Plugged my new cable in, closed the case up and the computer powered right up detecting my hard drive so my power cable was working.

And yes I know the photo quality leaves a lot to be desired.

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machus » do it yourself

Making a power sata cable