Staggered Spin-Up

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.

Advertisements

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.

Advertisements

Related Terms

Latest Hardware Terms

Related Reading

Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…