Staggered spinup on WD GP drives

[XS Janus]

I have a 3ware 9650SE controller and 4 wd1000fyps drives.
I'm trying to make this staggered spinup thing work when cold starting the system. But no matter how I connected them on my 3ware controller the drives startup all at once.

The thing is, in windows, after the drives fall asleep and you activate them, they will do staggered spinup just as it was set on the controller, just not on boot up

I did the tests again and I guess I noticed wrongly before.
The GP drive do power immediately on when power is connected to them. :/

I've set up the 3ware controller to spin up 1 drive at intervals of 1sec. and put SATA mode to SATAOOB
All drives have PM2 enabled via jumper on the drives.

I did notice that, "sometimes" and I do stress sometimes, while in enclosures, on cold start the drives in the same cage do start up in 2 instances (maybe 3 drives and a while latter 1 more :confused:
Could something override controller settings and sometimes decide my current PSU has sufficient juice? :shrug:

These are the things I've tried:
1. 3xGP drives powered by 4->15pin power connectors direct attached on 3ware via sata ML cable
2. 3xGP drives powered by PSU provided SATA power connectors direct attached on 3ware via sata ML cable
3. 3xGP drives powered by 4->15pin power connectors inserted in a straight through SATA ICYDOCK back-plane drive enclosure attached on 3ware via sata ML cable
4. 3xGP drives powered by PSU provided SATA power connectors inserted in a straight through SATA ICYDOCK back-plane drive enclosure attached on 3ware via sata ML cable

The result is always the same: the drives power-up simultaneously, and while in windows, after they fall asleep they will obey 3ware and spin-up one at the time.

Now I saw on the web that insulating power pin11 could make the drives wait for power-up command from controller, BUT i also saw that pin11 is used for drive activity monitoring and THAT function works very well on these enclosures and I would hate to loose it by insulating Pin11.

Anyway i don't think I could insulate pin on the enclosure itself, its out of reach. Maybe it could be done on the hdd itself. But I can't believe all this is required just to enable this feature...


WD info on pin11, look under LED:
http://www.wdc.com/en/library/sata/2579-001097.pdf

I also found this:
http://3ware.com/KB/article.aspx?id=14889 The same jumper settings already posted, and
http://3ware.com/KB/article.aspx?id=12072, which mentions some utility but I haven't noticed it doing anything to the drives.

Any ideas?
:( If someone had a similar occurrence please tell.
That would be most helpful and very much appreciated.:(

Sorry for the long post, and thanks once again for any input anyone can provide.
;);)

[ZOMGVTEK]

I dont think the thing would have booted up yet to determine how it needs to spin up the drives on a cold boot.

But whats the big deal with having them do that anyways?
If your psu can handle it... It would just i guess sound kinda cool, and put less strain on the psu, but take longer.

[XS Janus]

Well I plan on hooking it up to a Pico-PSU for low power. So I may run into the problem.
Anyway, I know that it should work in staggered mode in boot up as well. My system disk is on the mobo controller, only the array is on 3ware.
The question is why won't it work that way: sata power connectors not supporting it, controller "sees" that my current psu won't have a problem with starting them all at once, or maybe some thing else?

Has anyone experimented with this kind of spinup mode? Any special settings you did to your hardware to make it work from boot up?

[STEvil]

Get a more efficient PSU if you want efficiency. Smaller PSU will just run out of power faster and may run lower efficiency due to running nearer to its maximum output capable.