Staggered Spin Up clarification needed

F

Faldaani

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 25, 2007
Messages
195
Hello

I can't seem to figure out what the requirements for staggered spin up are, and I seem to get conflicting information. So, someone that knows for sure, what do I need to get my drives use staggered spin up, assuming I have the following.

A normal PSU. A bunch of Seagate 7200.10 SATA drives. An Areca-1220 or better controller.

From what I've managed to find out by using Google and forum search I need one or more of the following:

1) A SATA Backplane that supports staggered spin up.
2) Removal of pin 11 of the SATA Power connector, or make sure it doesn't short to ground (Which said backplane is supposed to do?)
See: http://www.sata-io.org/docs/S2Ext_1_2_Gold.pdf if you think I'm making this up!
3) Divine intervention
4) Nothing, the Areca and Seagates should stagger if configured properly.

So, which one is it?

As an addition to this, I configured my controller to use a 6 second staggered spin up and put my fingers on the drives in order to attempt to "feel" when they spun up. Sure felt like they all spun up at the same time, then the raid controller stayed at its "Wait for me to become ready" screen for over a minute (6 second delay on 8 drives).

Wish I had raptors so I could at least HEAR them spin up.

Oh, and mods, please don't kill me for making threads, they're about different topics, I swear :D
 
Could be controller, drive incompatibility. For example my high point 2320 doesn't support staggered spin up on my wd or seagate drives. Since i know it's not supported I never messed around with it, and my corsair 620hx doesn't seem to have any issues powering up 16 drives at the same time.
 
is this to not kill your PSU, or for "cool" factor?

It should be an option in your controllers BIOS.

Also, depending on raid level even though it may feel like the drives are spining up at the same time, there is no way to be sure the controller isn't giving them all max power at the very start.

some raid's require spindle sync so it takes a few seconds for the array to sync itself up. Especially if you mix and match HD vendors.
 
Its to spare my future PSU once I add some drives, and yes, the feature is enabled in the controller. Just not too sure it actually works.

The raid level is a good point, I didn't think of that. 4 drives in 1 Raid5, 4 drives in another.... but then I should be able to sense a difference between arrays?
 
Some drives have a jumper on them on whether to spin up immediately or not, usually you have to add a jumper to the drive to have it not spin up right away and wait for the controller to spin it up.
 
On these Seagate HDD's the only thing the jumper does is enable/disable SATAII mode
 
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