Hitachi, Ltd.

Tosuke Seo

Atsushi Tanaka

Yoshihisa Kamo

Hitoshi Kakuta

With respect to the disk drives provided power from a single power source in a disk drive system, start up power is first supplied to a first start-up group of the disks, preferably comprising all of the master disks, with the size of the group being selected so that the required current does not exceed the capacity of the power source. When the disk drives of the first group have substantially reached steady state, start-up is conducted with respect to a second start-up group of the disk drives so that the current required during start-up for the second group and the current required for steady state drive of the first start-up group does not exceed the capacity of the power source. With respect to each start-up group, the number of disk drives is the maximum integer value and decreases or remains the same with respect to subsequent start-up groups. When simultaneously transferring subdivided data in parallel to all of the disk drives of a parity group, respectively, seek operations in such a system are prevented from occurring simultaneously by offsetting the indices on the disks, by varying the seek operation start timing or by varying the head addresses for the start of reading and writing, all within one revolution, but the seek operations are ended at the same time, to reduce peak current requirements of the power source.

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Sagamihara, Japan

Tosuke Seo