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I am looking into putting together 1-2 sata drives on a dedicated board (similar to raspberry PI).

I saw that there are some Mini-PCIe to sata adapters but these only contain the data link and the power would be sent to HDD by a separate wire.

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My question: the mainboard/computer needs to act as a relay on the power cable sent to HDD and cut power there? OR the spin-down/sleep HDD command is sent to the HDD by the sata connector and basically tells the drive to cut it's own power source.

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It’s a command the host sends to the drive.

In your regular PC, power is supplied directly from the PSU. It’s supplied as long as the PC is on, whether or not the drive is in standby. This is necessary because if the drive were to shut down completely, you would not be able to access it again.

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    You will want the same power supply to provide power to the maincomputer which is connected to this Mini-PCIe to sata adapters and the HDD. Otherwise if they were support the HDDs power could be cut while the system was running which would be not good for your data.
    – Ramhound
    May 15, 2015 at 14:57

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