[mythtv-users] Power bill vs SchedulesDirect bill

[David Brodbeck]

On Sep 18, 2007, at 4:10 PM, Yan Seiner wrote:
>   With new mobos having 4 - 6 SATA connectors, it would be nice if the
> drives could be told to spin up sequentially rather than all at once.

The SATA spec defines a pin to control staggered spinup, but I think  
most cheap controllers don't support it.

With IDE drives the situation isn't quite so bad, because most drives  
delay spinup for a few seconds when they're configured as a slave.   
So if you have two drives per channel, only half the drives will spin  
up at once.

Most serious SCSI RAID controllers spin up drives in staggered  
pairs.  This can be a lot of fun to listen to on a big array,  
although it also makes the boot much more time consuming.  I've had  
servers that would take over a minute just to get to the point where  
they were executing the boot loader.