Seven ways of adding a SATA drive.
Adding support for two more SATA drives
In May 2018 I got an email from Taigun in Romania
who had used the onboard mini PCIe slot to fit a MPX-3132 SATA controller. The card adds support
for two more SATA II drives.
Taigun had also opted to use 3.5" drives in his NAS
setup and had located a suitable spot on the motherboard to pick up a 12V supply that they need.
This is shown in the photo right.
I would just note two things here:
- You need to size your power supply suitably to be able to cope with the additional power drain of the drives
(or anything else) that you are adding.
- If you pick the 12V directly off the board you are relying on the on-board switching regulator that's producing
the 12V supply being able to deal with the demands of the drive(s). Obviously Taigun
hasn't had a problem but I have no idea how much extra current you can safely draw from the t5740's 12V supply.
The more paranoid of you might like to use one of the 'buck' converters that I mention under the Apps tab
(scroll down to close to the bottom of the page) and connect that direct to the 19V input to the t5740.
Here is Taigun's setup. You can see the yellow wire picking
up the 12V supply for the 3.5" drives. He's picked up the 5V supply from the traces for a SATA power
socket that are by the IDE interface.
