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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.

5 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. Yes, Cliff, that's the problem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Buying a larger power supply would be much more cost efficient than trying to devise some device that alternated current between hard drives.

    There isn't any glory in such a hardware hack. There is just a lot of wasted time for a non-issue.

  2. External by hogsback · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Just move them outside the box with their own power supply.

    Seems a lot safer and easier than trying to 'fool' them.

    --
    Hogsback
  3. Bite the bullet by CounterZer0 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If your power supply can't handle booting, it needs to be upgraded! That's like always having to have someone around to jump your car...it means something is underpowered and not working right. You might wanna try DUAL power supplies, instead of one MEGA power supply...it's how we support 12+ Ultra3 SCSI drives in one box in all of our servers ;)

  4. Another solution by infernalC · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I would reccomend putting some drives in another case, but here's an alternate solution:

    Get a housing that will hold a bunch of two-circuit switches, one for every two drives. Get a bunch of those little hdd power cable ends (male and female) and some Y-cables, one for every two drives. Get the switches as well. Put the switches between the power supply and the drives. When you power up, throw a switch and let one pair spin up, repeat until done. Set a boot password on the BIOS. Don't enter it until all drives are spun up. If it does IDE detection before the passworf prompt, just do a soft reset.

    This is really dumb. Get another power supply, or get one of those nifty DEC StorageWorks towers from your nearest data center that's chucking them out the window.

  5. Cheapass by Ratbert42 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Rig some toggle switches on both power lines to each drive and have the operator manually turn on the drives as the machine is powering up.

    Or do the right thing and go SCSI.