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Ability to skip waiting for hard drives to spin up
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punkid View Drop Down
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    Posted: 25 Jul 2015 at 6:18pm
I have an ASRock Z87 Fatal1ty Killer motherboard. The SSD is a Kingston V300, along with 3 other hard drives. UEFI Boot mode.
The loading of the OS itself is very fast, but the POST takes very long. 
Fastboot and Ultra Fast boot have almost no effect.
Without connecting the hard drives, the system boots fast with a "Last BIOS time" of 3-4 seconds, but with the hard drives connected, POST takes much longer, the "Last BIOS time" increases to 14 seconds.

So an option to skip waiting for HDDs in the UEFI would be awesome. Is it possible ?
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I wish I could tell you there was such an option, but it doesn't exist.

Older mother boards had an option to increase the amount of time for POST to wait for HDDs to start up. You could set that option to wait for up to 30 seconds, just what you don't want.

I wish your board had the ASRock HDD Saver feature. That allows you to turn off and on two drives, using them only when you need them. Of course you must restart the PC when they are off to get them started, but that feature might let you start up faster with fewer drives sometimes.

Otherwise the only thing I can think of is if you had some hot swap bays for the HDDs. You would need to have the HDDs unplugged when you start the PC, and then connect them to the hot swap bays once the PC boots.
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Use windows sleep or if longer then a few hours, use hibernate instead of cold boots. 
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Can anyone else using SSD as boot drive along with hard drives in their system comment on their last bios times?
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Unplug any peripherals,  all USB's, and time boot, see if they are the problem.

Did you install any software to the HDD, it could be in start and  win wants to access.

Turn off SMART in UEFI / BIOS.  
 
Was the drive plugged in when installing windows in UEFI, if so  move storage data, WIPE / ZERO drive and put data back. 
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Points: 4996 		Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote parsec Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 27 Jul 2015 at 12:21am
Originally posted by punkid punkid wrote:

Can anyone else using SSD as boot drive along with hard drives in their system comment on their last bios times?


One or more of the HDDs you use might cause the long post, depending upon the model, how old it is, etc. Are they all the same model, or different?

If you have different HDDs, disconnect the oldest one, or if one is a "green" model at less than 7200 RPM. Then do a cold boot and check the time. Don't forget that the Win 8 fast startup only works from a cold boot, not on restarts.

My point is you might find one HDD that is particularly slow at waking up. Still no magic fix for slower HDDs, SSDs are up an running in a couple seconds.

The fastest starting PC I have is an ASRock Z87 Extreme6 board with a... G3258 at (usually) 4GHz. It has two SSDs in it, zero HDDs. UEFI booting, from power button push to POST beep is about three seconds, POST beep to Windows 10 desktop, another three seconds.
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Points: 6 		Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote punkid Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 27 Jul 2015 at 5:37am
I did what you said.
I have 3 hard drives plus boot SSD
 -WD Caviar Black 1TB
 -WD Caviar Green 2TB
 -Seagate Barracuda 500GB (Newest)

Both the WD drives have a similar affect, their "Average Drive Ready Time" from the spec sheet is 11-13 second and that is what i see: POST stops at code A2 for 11-13 seconds before proceeding.

The seagate drive probably has a shorter spinup time and it doesnt hold at code A2 for long.

Ive messed with all other settings, nothing seems to help. The Fast Boot Modes have no effect.
Here is a video with the hard drives DISCONNECTED, i wish it could have been this way with them connected too: https://youtu.be/QPCnM9E2pHo

P.S : It seems to be really stupid that the UEFI has to wait for all drives to get ready before proceeding to boot even though the drives are not in the boot priority list. It's 2015, and there should be a way around this...It even causes problems because if a drive is faulty, it will halt booting and leave the PC useless unless the device is disconnected, making it harder to troubleshoot since the system will not start with the device.



Edited by punkid - 27 Jul 2015 at 5:38am
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Points: 22688 		Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Xaltar Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 27 Jul 2015 at 1:08pm
I agree with you Punkid, I have often had systems hang on post because of slow initializing drives. I have an old 60gb Maxtor drive that I sometimes use to test older systems with and it takes about 10mins at times to spin up due to its age and mechanical wear, once it spins up the first time it behaves as normal. Having the ability to skip initialization of non boot drives would definitely be useful to a number of users.

UEFI removes a lot of restrictions encountered in the old text based BIOS interface and its little things like this that will help push it in new directions. I don't see why it shouldn't be possible given how reliable plug and play is in OSes of today. 
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Originally posted by punkid punkid wrote:

I did what you said.
I have 3 hard drives plus boot SSD
 -WD Caviar Black 1TB
 -WD Caviar Green 2TB
 -Seagate Barracuda 500GB (Newest)

Both the WD drives have a similar affect, their "Average Drive Ready Time" from the spec sheet is 11-13 second and that is what i see: POST stops at code A2 for 11-13 seconds before proceeding.

The seagate drive probably has a shorter spinup time and it doesnt hold at code A2 for long.

Ive messed with all other settings, nothing seems to help. The Fast Boot Modes have no effect.
Here is a video with the hard drives DISCONNECTED, i wish it could have been this way with them connected too: https://youtu.be/QPCnM9E2pHo

P.S : It seems to be really stupid that the UEFI has to wait for all drives to get ready before proceeding to boot even though the drives are not in the boot priority list. It's 2015, and there should be a way around this...It even causes problems because if a drive is faulty, it will halt booting and leave the PC useless unless the device is disconnected, making it harder to troubleshoot since the system will not start with the device.



What you are stuck with is simply POST doing its job. The POST A2 and other Ax SATA POST processes are one of if not the last thing done in POST.

POST is establishing the SATA "link" or connection to the drives in the PC. Windows or any OS expects that SATA link to all drives to be established before the OS is running. If it isn't then the drive or drives won't be recognized by the OS.

The rules or protocol of POST are coded into the processes. If we were to tell the programmers we don't like the way POST works to establish the connections to the drives on a PC because it slows down the cold startup time by a matter of seconds, they would roll their eyes or other reactions you can imagine. They would tell you to configure all your slow to start drives as hot plug devices and connect them after the OS boots.

By the way, did you happen to try that with your HDDs? Set them all for hot plugging in their entries in Storage Configuration? I'm NOT SAYING that I know that will change anything, it probably won't but anything is worth a try.
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punkid View Drop Down
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Points: 6 		Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote punkid Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 28 Jul 2015 at 4:49pm
Just tried settings them all to hotplug, doesnt have any effect. 

I think i must make my peace with it :(
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