How do I stagger the startup of hard drives?

What are you trying to do?

What hardware are you using?
 
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Be careful.

Some hard drives do not respond well to the staggered spin up commands and then never spin up again.

I bricked 2 that way.
 
Some HBA cards allow for staggered spin up to be selected in the card bios. This will depend on the hardware you are using. If its just the drives on the Motherboard then I do not have any help for you.
 
List your hardware, especially the drive controller, it will help us determine how you can do it, and if you can do it.
 
If there is an option for staggered startup it would be in the settings for the LSI HBA. During initialization of the HBA there should be a key combination that will get you into the settings for the hba. This will be separate from the bios.
 
I think that LSI SAS2008 staggers the spinup by default. Atleast it does on the supermicro machines I got at work.
 
mowge, it could also be the backplane too.

If your using hotplug scsi/fc/sas disks, it should just happen. If your using sata, you will need to use the powerup in standby jumper if it has one, or send it a command to set it over ata.
 
patrickdk said:
mowge, it could also be the backplane too.

If your using hotplug scsi/fc/sas disks, it should just happen. If your using sata, you will need to use the powerup in standby jumper if it has one, or send it a command to set it over ata.
Click to expand...

That is very possible. It's a SC828 chassi with SAS drives :)
 
Don't need huge psu and ups's. You won't blow a breaker.

It just evens out the amp load when it turns on. Some units I have, take 2amps to run, but 15amps to turn on. So if it wasn't staggered, it would basically be a dedicated breaker per unit. Staggered means it only uses like 3-4amps to start, but is avgeraged out over a longer startup time.
 
Additionally staggered spinup often requires a jumper setting on then backplane, at least on Chenbro systems. That said, a lot of the newer consumer drives seem to outright ignore the setting, including WD Reds, WD Greens, Samsung F4 and F3 drives. It works on F2 drives, however.

Staggered spinup is not to be confused with PUIS (power up in standby), which no SAS HBA I used is compatible with. PUIS is a drive setting that can be set by hdparm for example. Only the Intel onboard controllers can even detect drives in that state.
 
My LSI onboard controllers spin up SAS drives one at a time during SAS BIOS initialization @ boot. Then the PCI 9211-8i does the same thing. I'm pretty sure this is default behavior.
 
Yeah default behavior for SAS drives. For SATA its academic and you're better off having a decent PSU to handle peak load at power up. In other words don't try to use staggered spin up as an excuse to cheap out on PSU.
 
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