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:
- 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?
- 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)