Antoine's system

[Antoine]

Do you have the wiring diagram about the power of the harddisk and the star grounding?

I don't have a real wiring diagram drawed up and although I could make one, the connections are fairly straightforward.

The things below are separately connected to the central ground point:
- all metal shields (sandwich of aluminum plate and copper tape foil)
- shielded DC input (19V) cable (sandwich of aluminum and copper tape foil plus a drain wire)
- shielded RAM memory modules (sandwich of an isolating teflon and copper tape foil plus a drain wire)
- the PC case/chassis
- the mainboard (a bit over redundant this one as the mainboard is earthed to the case as well through the spacers it is screwed to)

The central ground is earthed through a copper cable directly to my PS Audio P3 powerplant. I simply used a schuko power plug with only the earth pole connected. I measured this connection and it indeed lowered the DC potential between the PC and safety ground.

The PC/HDPlex ATX DC converter is fed through the 19V supplying HDPlex linear PSU which is earthed to the P3 using a Belden 19364 power cable with Wattgate IEC+schuko plugs.

The SSD harddisk is powered directly by a Anker Astro E5 (1st generation, 2nd doesn't work as it powers down automatically because of the low current draw of the SSD) powerbank Li-ion battery. I've used a standard spare SATA power cable and cut the yellow (12V) and one black cable from it (SSD's only need +5V) and soldered the remaining red+black cable to the red+black wires of a spare USB cable as the Anker provides USB A plug outputs.

Search Google for both SATA and/or USB pinouts diagrams if you build yourself a cable from ground up. I mentioned I have the parts in home so I have to do this as well. I simply ordered a USB A plug kit from Mouser together with some other supplies and will use the current SATA connector and some power cable I have lying around to make a better DC cable. The USB cable I used has very thin wires and although it works perfectly I'd like it to become a bit more robust. I'll also make a better DC cable that feeds the JCat USB card externally through a selfmade USB-DC 5.5/2.1mm plug again with parts from Mouser. This card is fed by my Kingrex UPower 5V battery supply (with USB A plug output).

Impressive stuff Antoine!

Guillaume

Thanks Guillaume!

All credits of course go to the very active community of computeraudiophile.com and JPlay.eu (and JPlay and Audiophil of highend-audiopc.com as suppliers) who have experimented so much over the years thinking up/trying out all the worthwhile optimizations. All it took me was a bit of DIY and a lot of reading.

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Oh, I forgot to mention that I've also bought a EMO Systems EN70-HD LAN isolator (http://www.emosystems.de/en/produkte/net...latoren-2/) to isolate the part of the network in my living room from the other parts of my home network. I use a separate switch for the network in my living that is powered though a linear PSU as well and the LAN isolator is used in the "uplink" to an other switch that connects all other network devices including my noisy DSL modem.

Also I've disabled the ethernet+WiFi ports of the Devialet.