New user setting up HL15 fully burned in. I was hoping to have hard drive Staggered Spin Up (SSU) functionality but seems like a no go. Anyone else have any luck with SSU?
On boot Kill A Watt spikes to 165W then back down to 100W after drives spin up. This is with 5 22TB Toshiba drives which were purchased with the HL15 from 45homelab. The drives are pretty quiet so it is hard to really tell without a side by side comparison with a working SSU cold boot, but to me it sounds like they fire all at once.
The AMI BIOS settings for PCH SATA Configuration came with “Spin Up Device” set to Disable for all SATA Ports 0 – 7. I tried changing all 8 SATA ports to Enable Spin Up Device but no change. 165W on cold boot falling back to 100W at idle. Also tried changing Spin Up Device to Enable for one SATA ports only with the other SATA ports set to Disable. No change.
I was planning on powering the unit off when not in use, although the thing is so quiet, probably can just leave it on. (Noctua fans and RM1000x fan set lowest setting but not off) However, if I am out of the office for a week, I’d probably want to power off.
With HL15 now coming with a 1000W power supply there is plenty of room wattage wise, but I would like to avoid the transient surge. Especially after populating all 15 drive slots.
Attach screenshot of BIOS settings. Any suggestions?
So if 5 drives give you a 65W surge, 15 drives would give a 195W surge. I don’t think I’d be too concerned with that on a 1000W Corsair PSU. Nonetheless, I think that BIOS setting is supposed to be the relevant one. I assume the drives are in the ports connected to the SATA (SFF-8087) connectors on the motherboard and not the ones connected to the onboard HBA (SFF-8643) connectors? I think by default drive bays 1-8 go to SATA and 9-15 go to the HBA. There is a different, similar, BIOS setting for the HBA-connected drives.
The 5 drives are in the 5 slots on the right. HL15 has them labeled as 1-1, 1-2, 1-3, 1-4, 1-5. I’ll pop it open tomorrow and see what is what. Sounds like the drives could be on the HBA and I made no adjustments there in the BIOS.
Those probably are the SATA connected drive slots. I just didn’t want to assume since, e.g., some people find it more natural to load the drives left-to-right and ignore the slot numbers, or use other patterns, since in most cases the physical position of the drives don’t matter.
I don’t cold boot my HL15 very often but I’m pretty confident I got the SSU to work on my full build. The drives also need to support it via Pin 11 on the power connector. These Toshiba’s look to be enterprise drives so I imagine they do but figured I’d put that out there as another factor in all of this.
One thought, did you remove power after making the BIOS changes? Generally, that shouldn’t be required but with the IPMI and everything it’s possible that the settings didn’t take hold. There was another person on the forum here who had issues with BIOS/Firmware updates until power was fully removed.
Yeah, I started slotting from left to right but then I looked at the numbers on the case so reverted to right side. Looking at the wire run from the back plane it does seem that that these drives are connected to the SATA on the motherboard.
Product manual for the drives I am using, Toshiba MG10AFA22TE mentions Staggered Spin-up Mode Detect on P11. I don’t know how to tell if the motherboard is using this pin.
Also I am not confident in my understanding of the BIOS description for Spin Up Device option which states:
“If enabled for any of ports Staggered Spin Up will be performed and only the drives which have this option enabled will spin up at boot. Otherwise all drives spin up at boot.”
I have tried different combos of Disable/Enable but no luck. Also am doing full power removal based on your suggestion.
Can I has how many drives you have installed and what your settings are for “Spin Up Device” for each drive?
Maybe SSU won’t become active until there are a certain number of drives or perhaps all slots populated.
I currently have 14 drives plugged into the backplane - 8 Seagate Exos, 4 Crucial SSD’s, and 2 Intel Enterprise SSD’s. However, I altered my setup a little bit. I swapped the cables around so I had 8 SAS connectors and 7 SATA.
So we have a few additional variables at play here (drive brand, SAS drives, SAS controller) in addition to the BIOS settings. Looking at my BIOS settings for the SATA ports, I think they are pretty much the same as the ones you shared.
Maybe try to move your drives to the slots 9-15 and see what happens using the SAS controller? I’ve had my HL15 for a few years now. If I find some time here, I can try to power it down and cold boot it to see if the SSU works. It’s always possible I’m misrembering something.
