Disk drives such as hard (magnetic) disk drives take a certain amount of time to initialize and "spin up" to the operational rotational speed of the disk or disks, thereby creating a time lapse from power up to when data can first be read from or written to the disk drive. This time lapse can be reduced, whereby some tasks conventionally done sequentially instead are performed in parallel. For example, the motor controller that controls the spindle motor can perform its portion of the initialization beginning at the same time that the remaining electronic components, including the hard disk controller, begin their initialization process including downloading firmware. Additionally, other portions of the initialization process typically performed by firmware can be performed by dedicated circuitry or a bootstrap program in the motor controller and hard disk controller, thereby not requiring the relatively slow downloading of system firmware.