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As we fill up a mid-tower case with more drives, the SATA cables get rather tricky to get in a position so that they enter the connection near perfectly aligned so as to not put any stress on the SATA connection points. This is exasperated by having a few expansion cards, RAM slots full, and additional wires from many fans to cool all chipsets, drives, etc.

My questions are:

  1. Can SATA connectors have a little stress from the cable pulling sideways a bit and still provide a reliable connection? OR how critical is it that cables enter their connection without any stress and near perfectly aligned?
  2. What is advice for reliably packing drives into a case with no tidy backplane leaving a web of cables instead?

In the end, we will probably have upwards of 8-10 drives in the tower maxing it out. Trying to figure out if we will run into stability issues related to cabling even with care. Cooling and power are taken care of. While cable management for the fans and power leads is in order, this still will leave many stiff SATA cables all running from and to the same point(s)

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Some SATA cables (their endings /connectors) are very fragile, low quality plastic so stress on them is not recommended.

It is best that you use the SATA cable types that have little metal clamps at the connectors. That will prevent them from being disconnected due to stress or accidentally and also will support additional stress if it exists.

This is a power SATA cable with clamps: http://www.frozencpu.com/products/image/1146/cab-81.jpg/cab-81/4-pin_to_Dual_15-pin_SATA_Power_Cable_w_Locking_Clips_GC6ATAM2.html?id=RtVFPnvL For the data SATA cable they look the same, so for the data cables try to use this type.

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  • Good point about the locking clips, we have both. I wonder how "safe" the locking clips make things for sideways movement. The biggest stress our cables seem to get is from the cable being pushed sideways from other nearby cables.
    – Damon
    Jan 30, 2015 at 7:50
  • They do help even for sideways pulling. Anyway, it appears you would need to also re-organize them a little.
    – Overmind
    Jan 30, 2015 at 8:03
  • I know they will hold them in, but I'm wondering if they will reliably prevent I/O errors. I've had problems in the past related to the cables not connecting well enough when things like the case cover pushed cables in a bit, or one cable was pushing on the next too much (not much at that). I know I can try it and see, but I was hoping to be a bit more preemptive than that. I definitely need to make sure they ALL have clips though. Thanks!
    – Damon
    Jan 30, 2015 at 8:10
  • Yes, they will. I have done intensive testing with this and even left hard drives hanging all their weight on SATA cables to test the effectiveness of various cable types. The results showed no IO error for any of the clip-type ones.
    – Overmind
    Jan 30, 2015 at 8:49

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