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Delaying Hard Drive Power Up?

Posted by Cliff on from the saving-wear-and-tear-on-the-power-supply dept.

Bamfarooni asks: "Does anyone know of a device that will delay powering up your hard-drives (or other internal devices)? We're trying to put a pile of IDE disks into a big disk server but the spin-up power for these disks is about 3x the maximum operating current. Rather than put in something really big like an 800W power supply, if we could just put something in-line that delayed the power through specific connectors for ~1 second, then we could mange with the built-in power supplies we already have." An interesting thought, but wouldn't the BIOS need to be aware of whatever delay is introduced? Otherwise it may interpret the delay wrongly and think that the drives on the IDE chain have timed out and are faulty.

2 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. Umm... by haplo21112 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What not put the Drives in a separate box, with its own power supply that way you can start that box 10 seconds before the main CPU box....ATX tower case 350`400watt power supply fits/powers 8-12 drives $100...cheap and easy.

    --
    Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
  2. Talk to a man named Farad about this by QuietRiot · · Score: 2, Insightful

    He'll tell you what you need in 2 words:

    Big Caps

    Put one on each the +5 and +12 volt rails going to your drives. Be sure they're charged and isolated from leakage before powering up the system.

    You could do a 2 stage power-up for your system. 1st stage uses the regular switch on your powersupply and does nothing but charge up the caps. Second stage is when you actually apply power to the motherboard and all your drives inside. This would require a separate switch that could turn on/off all the +-5 and +-12 volt legs necessary. A few relays or solid-state relays would do nicely, perhaps a plain triac or SCR on each would do, but you'd need to do some reasearch on those. I haven't messed with them for some time now.

    After you hit the 2nd switch, the drives would get the current they need from both the caps and the regular [underpowered] supply.

    Of course this is all a bit more work than just getting another small powersupply for $15 or so like everyone else is suggesting -- but you asked the question.