Well, I had a discussion with the ChatGPT… and the chances are low. I am a complete layman when it comes to u-boot stuff so the information may not be accurate. According to my understanding, there are two ways how to achieve this:
- the hardware/power supply one: This would require just to connect power to the drives individually one by one. To do that, the SATA power connectors on the board would have to be connected to the main supply through individual switches. But this is not the case. All the SATA power connectors on the ROCK 5 ITX board are sharing the same power trace.
- the software one: This requires support of Power-Up In Standby (PUIS) in the disk, in the SATA controller and in the software. In the PUIS mode, the drives are powered immediately, but some special commands have to be sent over the PCIe to spin them up. The SATA controller is ASM1164, which allegedly has the PUIS support. BUT… (we are still far from the finish line)…we would need to add support for this into the u-boot or write own driver (linux is using standard AHCI driver which has no clue about the controller). It seems that both ways are pretty unrealistic as they would require deep knowledge of the ASM1164. The ultimate killer is that (according to the ChatGPT) the necessary documentation is not published by the ASMedia.
If there is anything wrong with the above, feel free to correct me.
