[geeks] SATA Drives and Delay Start

[Sridhar Ayengar]

Aaron Finley wrote:
> 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.

Except that there are no jumpers on the drive.

Period.

The only place I can see to set options is in the controller firmware.

Peace...  Sridhar