Multiple M1015's - Staggered Spinup Question

[guitarlp]

Once you flash an M1015 into IT mode you can choose to flash or not flash the BIOS. Flashing the BIOS causes slower boot times as the cards will give you time during the BIOS Post to enter a keyboard command to enter the BIOS. Within the BIOS is a staggard spinup option, but from my understanding, that won't work for me as I'm using SATA drives instead of iSCSI drives.

 

However, that got me thinking. If I have 3 M1015's and have the BIOS loaded on each, wouldn't my server go through the following process:

 

1.) Power is turned on and everything is supplied with power.

2.) The drives connected to the MOBO ports are first spun up.

3.) The BIOS finds the first M1015 and spins up the drives, waiting for the user to enter a prompt to enter it's BIOS.

4.) After some time has passed, the BIOS finds the second M1015 and spins up the drives, waiting for the user to enter a prompt to enter it's BIOS.

5.) Again, after some times has passed, the BIOS finds the third M1015 and spins up the drives, waiting for the user to enter a prompt to enter it's BIOS.

6.) The BIOS finishes with everything and loads the defined boot drive.

 

If that's correct, that's sort of a mini spinup feature in of itself. Unless my logic is incorrect the all 3 M1015's come online at the same time and all 24 drives connected to those cards spin up at once. But I would imagine each card would have it's own BIOS prompt, and therefor 8 drives would spin up at a time instead of all 24 at once.

 

Can anyone confirm?