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SATA Staggered Spin Up Help

I

irasnyd

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Apr 6, 2001
Messages
1,051
I've purchased 4 Maxtor Diamondmax 10 hard disks (6L300S0 model, BANC1G10 firmware) and a Promise SATAII150 TX4 controller for them.

I would really like to enable staggered spin up, which both the drives and the controller claim to support. Maxtor's documentation (here: http://www.maxtor.com/_files/maxtor...s_technical/staggerd-spin-detection-pin11.pdf ) states that you can use a jumper to force staggered spin up to be on.

If I put a jumper on each of my drives, and boot the computer, they do not spin up at all. If I take off the jumper (then the Pin 11 on the drives is grounded, I've checked with a multimeter) then the drives all start normally, but all at once (which is what I'm trying to avoid with the staggered spin up)

So has anyone managed to get staggered spin up working, and can you give me some pointers?

Thanks,
Ira
 
You have to have a controller that supports staggered spin up. It's a command that the SATA controler has to send each drive to spin up. Most motherboards and add in cards don't support this.

Staggered spin up is really a setting meant for RAID arrays and as such generally on RAID controllers can send this command.
 
This is the controller I have, and according to Promise it does support staggered spin up: (see the "Serial ATA Support" section of the page)
http://www.promise.com/product/product_detail_eng.asp?segment=Non-RAID HBAs&product_id=129

My drives also support staggered spin up, according to Maxtor. I just don't know why they don't spin up when I enable it. I'm guessing that the controller isn't doing what it needs to do, but I don't know how to turn the feature on.
 
It sounds like you need to leave the jumpers on. Staggered spinup will then send a signal to each drive, telling it to turn on the motor. This is probably an option somewhere in the card's BIOS; have you looked around in there? How long did you wait with the jumpers on? The card may not send any signals for spinup until it gets to the BIOS for it.

If there's no BIOS I'm out of ideas.

 
Yep, I agree. Leaving the jumpers on, I let the system sit for at least 5 minutes, both pre-bootup (just in the BIOS) and also letting it boot all the way into both windows and Linux (with the appropriate drivers installed in each OS). The drives just never spun up. They do get detected at boot time, as "Maxtor SABRE" which is interesting, since these drives are not that model. (With the jumpers off, they get detected as what they are: Maxtor 6L300S0). Booting Linux gives me the message "dev 0 not supported, ignoring" where it should detect each drive. (I see the message 4 times, if all the jumpers are on)

There is no key to enter the BIOS mentioned at bootup time, when it is detecting drives, nor is there mention of a BIOS on the card in the manual.

I've tried Ctrl-F and Ctrl-F6 (which were the two keypresses that I could find online for promise controllers). No luck with either of them.

I'm out of ideas too. Everything I've read on the web says that both the drives and controller should support staggered spin up, but I haven't seen any success stories anywhere. :)

I've tried mailing promise's support department about this, but they haven't gotten back to me yet (it's been 2 days now). Of course, this is the holiday season, and they could all be on break.

Thanks for the help!
 
irasnyd said:
I've tried mailing promise's support department about this, but they haven't gotten back to me yet (it's been 2 days now). Of course, this is the holiday season, and they could all be on break.
Click to expand...
Patience, young grasshopper. I've waited 6 weeks before getting a response from Tyan. :rolleyes:

 
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