@gprovost To be clear, once i disconnected the external USB drives and plugged them into my PC and saw them power up and run just fine i decided to power down the whole helios4 and disassemble it to get ready for new drives.
Then i just tried to plug one 2 of the 3.5" SATA drives in to see what would happen when i put power back on and nothing spun up. Then i tried a single drive alone, once in each of the 4 power connectors after powering down and up each time. no spinning up. Then I tried a brand new WD Blue drive, and then a brand new WD Red drive and nothing powered up on any single attempt.
If i took a random 2.5" drive and plugged it in to the SATA connections, then it worked no problem. and was detected by the OS. So that's what led me to think that there's a problem getting enough power supplied to the 3.5" drives now and from that it can't power USB drives with anything connected either, hence the total system went down and stays down.
Each time just to be clear, i completely powered down the device and then powered up with a different slot or drive connected and only the 2.5 connected by SATA worked