Staggered Spin-Up

Definition - What does Staggered Spin-Up mean?

Staggered spin-up is a physical performance strategy for serial ATA hard disk drives or RAID DISK drive systems. With staggered spin-up, engineers handle the electrical load and system capacity during startup by staggering the times when disk drives begin input/output (I/O) operations.

With the traditional strategy, all drives spin up when device or system power is turned on, but staggered spin-up delays the spin up of some drives to provide a more stable demand to the power supply.

Techopedia explains Staggered Spin-Up

Staggered spin-up issues include the following:

Developing system firmware that recognizes the staggered spin-up strategy, rather than demanding that hard disk drives spin up prior to user commands
Operating system (OS) compatibility with the staggered spin-up strategy, preventing situations where an unaware OS reads delayed devices as inaccessible or otherwise does not understand the process.

Staggered spin-up is typically accommodated by a power-on self-test (POST) method, where the basic input/output system (BIOS) controls the boot process.