[geeks] SATA Drives and Delay Start

[Aaron Finley]

Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Mar 2008, Lionel Peterson wrote:
>> Couldn't this be a signal that is sent down the wire (i.e. a pin held
>> high until the cards firmware takes over?), and the drives are
>> designed to await that lowered line signal (which would not otherwise
>> exist)? OR, what happens when a drive is powered up without any
>> connection? Does it start up by default, or does it await a signal
>> from the controller?
> 
> Wouldn't a more reasonable design be to wire all the SATA power
> connectors so as to enable delayed spin-up and have the drives' firmware
> written to spin the drive up in response to some sort of probe command?
> 

Most drives I have seen have jumpers which either set spin on power 
applied or spin on controller command.

The default on the SCSI drives I have used, at least, seems to be to 
wait until the controller command to spin up.

For example, my Dell workstation does not spin up its drives until it 
hits the Adaptec info in POST.

I figure with the SATA controller's staggered spin up that this would 
work exactly as the OP wanted. You should be able to set the drives not 
to spin up as soon as power is applied.

-- Aaron