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HP Z420… More Drives!

Oh look, more SATA…

The TrueNAS build is still going on! Last time we talked about Drive Caddies but that was weeks ago. Blame work being busy and some travel mixed in, anyway… I thought I could only add six drives to the Z420 because there were 6 SATA power cables… of course there were more than 6 SATA data ports! (Yes, there are five 2.5″ drives in the photo above.)

The optical drive power cable was one of the old 4 pin jobbers, but guess what? They make 4 Pin Male IDE Molex to 15 Pin Female Dual SATA Adapter/Splitters. So I got one. Well, two actually because it’s a two-pack.

So yeah, now I have 7 SATA drives plugged in, and can actually add one more. There are two pools, each with three disks, and then the boot drive, and I will see about adding a second SSD to mirror the boot drive. Yeah, 8 drives… who would have thought such things were possible! This is the free computer that just keeps on giving!

I will have to rethink the strategy of fitting all the drives into the front bay though. Luckily they are all 2.5″ so it may just be a matter of using some of those two-high 3D printed drive caddies I found.


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2 replies on “HP Z420… More Drives!”

I am curious to see if you reach a point where you need to pack them two-wide. The idea never occurred to me until I saw a commercial product (*) but obvious in hindsight. Mathematically two 2.5 goes into one 5.25 with a bit of room left over. Once I knew such a thing existed, I searched and found a few 3D-printable designs. But I haven’t needed such density so I’m watching your experiments to see if you do!

(*) Athena Power BP-15287SAC.

Hmm, doing two wide is a good idea! I may need to look for some STL files, or… even though I said I did not want to design my own, I might have to!

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