[Junglebizz]

I recently assembled a system for a friend with the following specs:

AMD Phenom II 1090T 3.2GHz
Coolit Systems Eco CPU Water Cooling System
Gigabyte 890FXA-UD5 F4 BIOS
4x2GB G.Skill F3-12800CL7D4GBECO 1.35v ram
60GB OCZ Vertex 2 Extended SSD
2TB Caviar Black
Sapphire Vapor-X Radeon HD 5770
Corsair TX850w PSU
Windows 7 Pro 64-bit

I have been having an issue with the system taking almost 25 seconds after power up to get to POST. After much messing around, I have determined that it is the 2TB Caviar Black that is causing it. I also tested this hard drive in two other computers and in both cases, once it was connected, the systems took about 25 seconds to POST and without it connected, took about 5-6 seconds to post.

A few bios settings:
SATA controller is set to Native IDE. When I had it set to AHCI, I was having a lot of BSODs.

SSD is on IDE Master Channel 0
WD is on IDE Master Channel 1
DVD drive is on IDE Master Channel 2

Boot Priority: SSD, WD, other
Boot Order: HDD, CDROM, Disabled

SATA3: Enabled

Why would connecting this hard drive cause the system to delay POST for 25 seconds? I'm starting to run out of ideas. The hard drive seems to work fine once the system is running but to have to wait that long at boot up every time seems ridiculous.

Help?

[Know Nuttin]

are you using the same SATA cable each time you try it in another system?

[Junglebizz]

Nope. The cables I used in the other computers were ones that other hard drives were using in those systems before I unplugged them.

[redduc900]

With OnChip SATA Controller set to Enabled, OnChip SATA Type should be set to AHCI w/ OnChip SATA Port4/5 Type set to IDE (this w/ both the WD HDD and ODD connected to those 2 ports). You might also want to try disabling SATA3.0 Support (controller will operate in SATA 3Gb/s mode; disables the SATA 6Gb/s function).

[Junglebizz]

When I had the system set to AHCI, I found I was getting a lot of BSODs which after some reading, looked like it was probably related to the SSD not supporting the AHCI functions.

I pulled this from the OCZ SSD guide found here: http://www.ocztechnology.com/res_old...ng-Up-SSDs.pdf


AHCI: the Advanced Host Controller Interface allows Hot-Plugging and Native Commands Queuing as
well as multithreaded access of the drive by applications. Enabling AHCI results in conflicts between the
controller and the drive that are apparent as sluggish overall system performance.

Also:
AHCI
AHCI is not official supported on OCZ SSDs and may under some circumstances affect performance,
specifically during windows installation. Enabling AHCI can result in higher performance in synthetic
benchmarks for SSDs and HDDs alike, but can cause hang-ups and intermittent freezes in SSDs since it
allows multiple access requests to compete for a drive that is not made to address re-ordering of
commands in the queue. We recommend AHCI is set to disabled in both Windows and in the BIOS.
Native Command Queuing greatly increases the performance of standard rotational drives but it has no
bearing on SSDs.

Or has this changed over time and they now can handle AHCI?

it is entirely possible that this was related to the RAM as I had some issues with stability running this ram at rated speeds (7-8-7-24). I had to turn them down to 9-9-9-24 and run it at 1.51v to get it to be stable.

I know I tried disabling the SATA3 support with no change, but I haven't tried setting the SSD to AHCI and the WD & ODD to IDE.

[redduc900]

That's the first I've heard that OCZ SSDs don't support AHCI. I thought all SSDs irregardless of the manufacturer supported AHCI... my mistake.

[Psycogeec]

and the way Winders OS tries to load, as one big pigpile doesnt help much does it.
there have been startup ordering programs available for windows OSes since win95. course it wont solution the way they have 30 drivers and 100 services trying to init all at once too.

I have redone the way windows loads way back before multi thread and mutiprocessing, and got OS loading speeds to lose many seconds, by purposfully delaying the startups, by Adding Waits . and that was just the most simple startup items conflicting with the shell starting up and all.

i wonder how much this effects things once you get going?
like for example the OS is always doing background stuff that isnt "nessisary" tracing, logging, background tasking, checking for stuff, quoing and storing stuff, in-so-much as creating rescent shorts and all (list is endless). toss all that stuff out, and you are left with just what the user and programs are actually doing at the time, instead of all the stuff the os does to protect itself and speed itself up.
.

[Junglebizz]

This is from May 3rd, 2010:

Source: http://www.guru3d.com/article/ocz-vertex-2-ssd-review/5


Enable AHCI

The last tip we want to give you to gain a little extra performance boost is that you enable AHCI mode. AHCI mode can help out greatly in performance for SSDs. Now, if you swap out an HDD for an SSD with the operating system cloned and THEN enable AHCI in the BIOS, then you'll get a boot error / BSOD.

I guess AHCI is now supported but was maybe flaky in the past?

[Junglebizz]

I decided to try some of what redduc900 suggested by moving the WD HDD and the ODD to the SATA 4/5 ports. This has actually caused the computer POST in 6 seconds!



...but, now it sits at "Detecting IDE Drives..." until the 23 seconds are up.
I'm going to keep trying different settings. Maybe even try enabling AHCI again for the sata controller and leave 4/5 in IDE mode.



EDIT: Changing to AHCI and disabling SATA3 had no impact on the time to boot. It still takes forever at "Detecting IDE drives"

I did some digging around and found this chart: http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc....7%2C279#jumper

Notice the "Average Drive Ready Time" specification for the 2TB? 21 seconds. Compared to the other drives I run which are the 640GB Caviar Blacks which have a time of 11 seconds, could THIS be the culprit? Does anyone else who runs this hard drive notice that a cold boot takes a long time to get past the detecting of IDE drives during startup?

I'm starting to get the impression that this is just the nature of the beast. t doesn't seem as noticeable when you only wait at "detecting IDE drives" for 17 seconds instead of 23 since 6 seconds are taken up by the usual POST.

[Psycogeec]

i got greens , i would bet they take even longer to get going, but i am in and out of that section in 6 seconds.
i can time speciific things with these WD greens (on my asus), but i would have to know FROM where, and if Powered OFF or not, and To where, end of HD scan, End of bios.

I just looked and being gigabyte it is all new to me (more than i thought)
the board has about 3 controllers total.
SO TRY:
Shut off the controllers that your not using in the bios.

other options (which i didnt check but would be in award and pheonix) Set the wait time to 0 for the controllers. the OS will still find them.

i think i am beginning to like Gigabyte, manuel was almost in english :-) I see now why gigabyte popularity is up and asus is waning.

Can i ask what you see on the boot screen with all the sata/raid controllers? or do you have that hidden with logo?

[Junglebizz]

I gave my friend the computer yesterday but in response to what you mentioned, I never found an option to set the wait time for the controllers. When the system boots, the 2TB comes up as IDE Master 0 and the DVD drive as IDE 0 slave as they are connected to the sata 4/5 ports. The AHCI windows shows the vertex after that.

I had AHCI re-enabled on the board for the other ports, but after setting up the computer and downloading some updates from the net, the computer blue screened on me again so I decided to disable AHCI again as a precaution and I also had to loosen the memory timings.

I run a Gigabyte board with G.Skill ram and it's awesome but for some reason, this board seems to be picky. Either that or the ram isn't as good as advertised because I can't get close to the rated timings of 7-8-7-24. It wasn't even stable at 9-9-9-24!


Asus popularity with me personally waned many years ago after getting many defective products and featureless boards. Sure they have boosted their features over the years, but the damage with me was already done with the poor quality control.

I have had great overclocking success with my GA-MA790X-UD4P board.