Am I able to hook up two 3.5" hard drives to the Zidoo with a Sata Splitter? Will the it provide enough power for the two drives?
I assume you mean a Z9X since the others have HD bays... A typical 3.5" disc drive can use up to 9 or 10W so if you err on the side of caution and call it 10W, that means a maximum total of 20W. Disc drives need a supply of 12v & 5V (and optionally 3.3v). The Z9X power supply is 12v, 2A which is 24W. The various voltages the disc drives require are provided by voltage regulators on the Z9X board which incur losses, but even if you consider the system lossless, the drives could drag 1.7A which could only leave 4W for the Zidoo to run which is 0.3A from the power supply. You have me curious so I just dry booted a Z9X (no peripherals and no network) on a bench supply and it peaked at 0.41A during boot and quiesced at about 0.20A. So bear in mind that that quiescent current is with the processor doing no work at all - add a load, in other words play a file and that value is going to rise. Doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room so I'd definitely recommend a separate power supply... You could use an uprated power supply for the Zidoo (say 5A) but I don't know the tolerances on the board for the SATA power, so I can't recommend it. (Admittedly that's what I'd do, but then I have a solder rework station and a lab )
Bad idea. A SATA port has its own stabilizer for 12V and 5V diverted from external PSU input. Don't mess around with that. If you want more drives use an USB docking with its own external PSU (1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 10 slots exist with or without RAID).
