spin up

spin up (third-person singular simple present spins up, present participle spinning up, simple past and past participle spun up)

1. (computing, intransitive, of a disk drive) To reach a sufficient spinning speed for reads and writes to take place.
   • 1987, PC: The Independent Guide to IBM Personal Computers, volume 6, page 222:

     Plated hard disk surfaces are actually harder and more scratch resistant than read-write heads are. The hard magnetic medium effectively protects itself from head crashes caused by contaminants and the drive's spinning up or down.

   • 2005, R. T. Stone, The Journals Book II: Into the Gulf, page 28:

     The hard drive spun up. The gray screen flickered. The smiley Mac face appeared and soon I was ready to dazzle the world with The Journals Book II.

2. (computing, transitive) To power up, launch, or instantiate.

   Near-synonym: spool up

   We spun up a virtual server in the cloud to handle the additional load.

3. (figurative, transitive) To fabricate.
   • 2023 April 1, Jonathan Weisman, “Trump and Fox News, Twin Titans of Politics, Hit With Back-to-Back Rebukes”, in The New York Times‎, →ISSN:

     For the better part of a decade, Donald J. Trump and his allies at Fox News have beguiled some Americans and enraged others as they spun up an alternative world where elections turned on fraud, one political party oppressed another, and one man stood against his detractors to carry his version of truth to an adoring electorate.

• spin down

• spin off

• pin-ups, pinups