Staggered spin-up : M1015 / LSI 9201-16i

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Khivar

n00b
Joined
Feb 22, 2014
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3
Hello,

I have some questions about these two cards and staggered spin-up:

About 9201-16i :

- Does the 9201-16i have staggered spin-up option in BIOS ?
- If not, does it have staggered spin-up somehow embedded in firmware or do all drives start simultaneously ?

About M1015 :

- Does the M1015 IT flashed have staggered spin-up option in BIOS ?
- Does the M1015 IT flashed without BIOS start all drives simultaneously or staggered spin-up is embedded in firmware ?
- In case of multiple M1015, do all drives spin up simultaneously or one card at a time ?

I have a relatively small PSU and sustaining drives once started won't be a problem but since it requires nearly 2A on 12V in order to spin-up one drive, it won't be possible to boot with many drives, it will overload.

Thanks in advance ! ;)
 
No worries, the more the merrier ! ;)

Hope some M1015 / LSI 9201-16i users will come by to shed some light on this !
 
I have M1015 flashed to IT and it seems that every drives are spining up at the same time so there is no stagging.How many drives you want to use ? 24 ? Well i have 6 so for me it would be difficult to compare. (I have 350W PSU)
 
I am no help either. I have a 9201-16i on a server with 14+ 2TB 7200 RPM SATA drives at work but I am not running a staggered spin up. I did not mess with this because the drives are on 24/7/365.
 
Thanks for your answers :)

That's bad news, I think I'll probably use between around 16 drives and I have a 380w PSU with 2 12v rails ( 15A and 17A ). So it won't be a problem once the system is started but starting the system will cause overload.
 
I have no direct experience with the M1015, but with the hardware-equivalent 9211-8i. I even had two of them in operation simultaneously. If you use two cards with BIOS, they will spin up consecutively, as it is only one "software" for both cards. When I disabled the cards BIOS in the system BIOS, the cards started to spin up on the driver initialization. Whether that works in parallel for both cards depends on the OS I suppose.

The problem really is that newer (SATA) drives do not seem to implement that feature. I had some Samsung F1 drives that honoured the staggered spinup, but all F3 and F4 did just spin up immediately regardless of the setting. All WD SATA drives I tested (Greens and Reds, at the moment all my fileserver drives are Reds) ignored the setting, too, and I think the single Seagate ST3000DM001 I tested did also not work. I guess that the "enterprise grade" drives like the WD RE4 should still implement that feature, but I would not just assume that it works.
 
I have had the same experience.

The cards support staggered spinup, and do this on bios/driver init.

The issue is, SATA disks don't support this, normally atleast. Delayed spinnup is required for SAS disks though, so if you get sas disks with a m1015/9211/..., it will work, without any issues.
 
How exactly does the BIOS on the card do staggered spin up? You need to BIOS active I guess but what settings control it... and then how do I find out if my drives support it? Your answer would be more use if it explained a little for us mere mortals ;-)
 
Khivar said:
I have a relatively small PSU and sustaining drives once started won't be a problem but since it requires nearly 2A on 12V in order to spin-up one drive, it won't be possible to boot with many drives, it will overload.

That's bad news, I think I'll probably use between around 16 drives and I have a 380w PSU
Click to expand...

How about we not worry about the staggered spin-up. How about we focus on the real threat and issue....
If your PSU is under-weight then you are risking things too much.

That many drives plus system needs a PSU twice that. Stop being a tight-wad.
 
It also depends on if you're powering your disks from a backplane or not.

All standard SATA power connectors (from your PSU) will ground pin 11. This will more or less make sure they DON'T stagger.

Most backplanes will leave Pin 11 floating or high, which will indicate to the drive that it is expected to NOT spin up until it gets some signals (sent by the controller).
 
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