[SOLVED] SATA drive spin up delays / Staggered Spin-up ?

[wrighar#]

I've recently moved to a new PC with an ASUS Prime Z790M-PLUS D4 mobo and an i7-13700 from my old i5-2500K. I moved my 4 sata drives over which run as 2 mirrored pairs in Raid 1.

Since moving to the new motherboard, it sounds like the drives all spin up sequentially, taking about 7-8 seconds each, meaning that it takes close to 40s before you get the login box in Windows 11.

It does this even when waking from sleep.

Is there a bios setting I'm missing that will allow all the drives to spin up together? I can find no info about this delayed/sequential drive spin up anywhere.

Thanks
Andrew

 

[Ralston18]

Two considerations here:

1) Moving drives, CPU, etc. to a different motherboard rarely works out. It may work, it may not work at all, or it may work with continuing problems. I.e., the "spin up" behavior.

2) RAID: RAID is very much obsolete and probably not needed unless there are specific requirements for using it. There are no benefits per se and managing the array is often quite problematic.

The solution is likely to be a clean Windows install into a non-RAID drive environment.

Moving post from Motherboards to Storage. More applicable category.

There may be other comments and suggestions.

 

[wrighar#]

Hmm, I should have said,
I'm using a pair of NVME gen 4 1 TB Solidigm P44 Pro's, one for my clean install of Windows 11 c:\, the 2nd as an Application disk and paging files etc d:\
The 2 pairs of RAID 1 mirrors which are moved from my old PC are for Photo's, docs and spreadsheets on one pair and video on the other pair.
I'm using RAID 1 for data resilience for the photos, docs and video, and over the last 11 years I've had 3 drive failures where raid has notified me and rebuilt when the failed drive is replaced. I also hae a NAS which I use for the 'stupidity' moment if I delete something by mistake.

The old Motherboard spun all the discs up together, so waking from sleep to login was a quick affair.

 

[geofelt]

The reason for a staggered spin up option is to avoid overwhelming the motherboard with a high current draw.
This was more useful in the past when there might have been many drives to contend with.
Yes, there should be an option in the bios to allow concurrent startup.
If you had no problem with 4 in the past, you are likely to be ok with concurrent start now.

Once started, why not leave the HDD devices spinning?
In power options you can set a very long time before automatically turning them off.
Sleep/wake should be faster.

 

[wrighar#]

When the PC is being used it is not a problem.
The issue is when waking the whole PC from sleep each drive spins up sequentially, and all drives have to have spun up before the login prompt arrives to get into the PC.
When they were in the old PC, all 4 spun up together when waking the PC and you could log in almost immediately.

We have the PC set to sleep after 10 mins inuse to save power as sleeping it 1.2w power draw, and awake and idle it's 160w

It's annoying that a new and much faster PC takes 40s to wake from sleep compared to the old ones 10s.

 

[fzabkar]

If you disconnect the SATA (?) data cables from your HDDs, do they still spin up? If not, then this would suggest that they are getting a spin-up command from your OS. I can't imagine it's a BIOS setting, since Windows is still in control when your system goes to sleep.

Drives can be configured to Power Up In Standby (PUIS). They then wait for an appropriate command to wake them up. This can either be any read or write command, or it can be a special Set Features subcommand. A tool such as HDAT2 can enable/disable PUIS.

SCSI drives have a jumper setting to enable staggered spin-up. The spin-up delay is determined by their SCSI ID.

 

[wrighar#]

Disconnecting the 4 SATA cables allowed all 4 HDD's to spin up concurrently, so it's some for of controller function staggering the spin up (and I can't find any setting to stop that).

Meanwhile I think I have sidestepped the issue, as in BIOS/UEFI I had enabled VMD, and stated that both PCIE and SATA were enabled under the VMD, which had meant I had needed to supply an 'F6' driver during windows install, and that all drives were seen under IRST.

Disabling PCIE under VMD and installing the appropriate AHCI driver has split the 2 HDD systems to 2 NVME and 4 SATA where Windows resumes from sleep quickly from the NVME, while the 4 SATA data drives now spin up in staggered form in background without delaying the login process.