Quickie about PSU ground wires

[Salad Fingers]

Hi!

I’m doing some wiring in my PC and to reduce the clutter and improve the looks I’m going to use some terminal strips. The idea is to only have one cable from the PSU to the terminal strip then connect my devices directly to that. What I want to know is can I use a common ground (-) terminal for all my devices regardless of their voltage? For example HDD drives take a +12V, +5V and two grounds (-). If I have both the ground wires running to the same terminal will my HDD still work?

Thanks

[ben333]

All the grounds are the same. You should change your idea though to include more wires feeding each strip. If you tried to run a high end video card with only a small single 12V wire replacing the original 6 - 12 wires I think you might run into some problems. Maybe you could run say 3 - 6 of each wire from the PSU to feed each strip and feel them to make sure they don't get hot or just run some thick copper wire from the PSU to the stips. I've done this before in the past and it does help clean things up if you plan the layout. Its also nice for adding fans and changing fan voltages. (hook the fan's + to 12V and the - to 5V and you get 7V which is quieter) I suppose you could even connect things to ground by simply hooking each ground wire directly to the metal frame of your case but maybe thats a bad idea, I'm not sure.

[Salad Fingers]

Thanks dude.

I'm only going to be running low wattage stuff off the terminal strip/s just some cathodes, 4 raptors, 2 DVD drives and 7 fans... actually yeah you're right, I think I’ll look into splitting it up a bit.

Thanks again!