Staggered Spin-Up

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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.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret 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 IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.