> 
> Another idea that occurred to me, the MSCP driver doesn't tell the
> controller to spin up the drives, it assumes the drives have been spun up
>
Well, it does. When the disk is read the first time the driver offers
a ONLINE command, and waits up to 4 minutes for the disk to come online.
An ONLINE command must always be given before a disk can be accessed.
The old MSCP driver also did this, but didn't wait long enough for the
disk to actually come online.

-- Ragge