Le 09/05/2023, milsabords a supposé :

Upgrade your PS, unless there is a BIOS option to delay powering of some HD.

Update: on my 8 years old desktop the BIOS has an option to set a delay
between power up and booting, to allow HD to spin up to speed.

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I found the solution. The setting on my
Mediasonic PROBOX 4 Bay 3.5” SATA Hard Drive Enclosure (new model)
needs to be set to "blue" sunchronization mode switch -- "When PC is
off, the device goes off in fifteen second". I previously had it set
to "Synchronization is OFF". This makes no sense but it works.

Thank you all for your suggestions.

On Wed, 10 May 2023 10:39:33 -0700, T <T@invalid.invalid> wrotG:

On 5/9/23 04:47, Howard wrote:

I have a problem with restarting my Windows 10 pc which I can't find
an answer to on google. When I restart my pc, it usually reboots
fine. However, if the machine has been idle for a couple of hours, a
reboot causes a shutdown which lasts for about 20 seconds and then the
machine reboots without me doing anything. I am running a Dell XPS
8930 and have Mediasonic PROBOX 4 Bay 3.5” SATA Hard Drive Enclosure
with three drives in it. I have checked the power settings.

Hi Howard,

How old is this computer?

I had one last week similar to what you describe,
where it would try to boot, get to random places,
shut off. Wait about five seconds and it powered
itself back on. Sometimes it did not make it past
BIOS/POST.

All the fans were operating okay and not clogged.
The heat sinks were cool. And it got worse with
time. A few times it almost logged into the
Windows. It was clearly a bad motherboard.
The unit was over 15 years old according to
the customer. Power supply was fine.

I removed the hard drive, which was fine and
temporarily mounted it to his new laptop
and copied his files over, which was all
he wanted anyway. He was done with the
old computer for some time, but did not
know how to transfer his files.

The old computer wound up in the dumpster.

You have a birthday coming up? Or father's
day? Time for a new computer?

Discount tech support: "Buy a new computer."

I would be extremely interested to find out
if you found a way to fix your unit!

-T

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On 5/11/2023 4:08 AM, milsabords wrote:

Le 09/05/2023, milsabords a supposé :

Upgrade your PS, unless there is a BIOS option to delay powering of some HD.

Update: on my 8 years old desktop the BIOS has an option to set a delay between power up and booting, to allow HD to spin up to speed.

The delay used to be up around 35 seconds (max). This
value (the max time allocated), might have been in some
ATA spec.

There was one drive, that took maybe 26 seconds to spin up.
To give some idea how close to that limit a drive could go.

And it's not like this is some kind of magic. On mainframes,
it might be ten minutes before a drive is ready to go online
(purge air time after pack loaded). Some of the old drives,
the operator controls putting the unit online, after
the hepafilter has cleaned the air inside the drive. The 26
seconds, is for a conventional 3.5" drive.

Drive starting current varies. Small boot drives with one
platter, may use more starting current than large drives
with many platters. The motor controller (three phase), implements
a roughly constant current acceleration profile for the
spindle. With the extra current offered, a low capacity drive
might take 5 seconds, a higher capacity drive 10 seconds.
There aren't many drives left, which take 26 seconds.
The amount of current used, is programmable and at
the discretion of the HDD design engineer (every drive
is *custom* designed, it's not like they use cookie cutters
-- even the platter data layout and the "jitter" in the
transfer curve, are custom, and not an accident).

Spinup Load/operate
+------------+
Idc | | 1TB drive
12V | +---------- - -
------+ ---> Time

Spinup Load/operate
Idc +------------------------+ 6TB drive
12V | +---------- - -
------+ ---> Time

XXXXXXXXXXXX
Answers commands (like "ID command")

You can stagger spin on drives. Not all drives support
staggered spin. It's usually the larger ones. On SATA,
there is a pin (one of the 15 pins) that senses whether
3.3V is present or 0V is present on the pin, and the
spin behavior depends on that level. When you buy a new
drive and "it won't work", don't panic -- switch from
a five wire SATA power cable to a four wire SATA power
cable, and it will start to spin and work, as normal.

[Picture] "Shit, my new 8TB drive does not work!"

https://i.postimg.cc/ydLvPMNS/HDD-spin-control.gif

It's usually the larger capacity drives, that support
staggered spin. The larger capacity drives also have
some holes "drilled in the wrong place", on the drive
body, compared to "normal consumer drives". I have no
samples of the alternate hole pattern, so can't just
take a picture of one.

On a NAS with a SATA backplane, or a rack server with a
SATA backplane, the connectors in that case, have a
3.3V logic signal in place of the orange wire. And the
NAS microprocessor asserts the signal on the equivalent
of the orange wire, to control spinup. Sending 0V means
"OK, you can spin now".

Paul

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