[H-GEN] My SATA, motherboard nightmare

[Brendon Higgins]

Hi everyone,

It looks like my issues were in fact somehow caused by the new PSU. I
tried the old PSU and sure enough everything worked fine. Put the new
one back in and got errors only seconds after I started tests.

Then I tried changing from using the native SATA power connectors and
replacing them with Molex->SATA adaptors, thus using different cables
from the PSU. It looks like doing that works - no errors so far. Very
strange.

I borrowed a multimeter from work and had a poke around all the
connections coming from the PSU. The only possibly abnormal voltage I
found was on the motherboard connector, pin 14, giving -11.20V when it
ought to be -12V. That's nearly 7% out, which I believe is out of spec
for this particular PSU. I didn't find any discrepancy on the SATA
power cables or anything else: everything was within about 1.5% of
nominal.

So I have no idea why connecting the HD to the Molex connectors
through an adaptor seems to work (I'll give this config a while longer
before I'm sure about it, though), and connecting to the SATA power
connectors of the PSU doesn't, even though the only difference between
the two are the additional 3V lines on the SATA.

Oh well, at least I've finally gotten somewhere with this. Though, it
would be my luck to try everything BUT the thing that's actually
causing problems, first. Dammit.

Thanks for the help, guys,
Brendon