I have Windows 7 installed on a Crucial 64gb SSD. Boot time with only the SSD attached is 40 seconds. When I have my two WD20EARS 2TB drives connected to the motherboard, boot time drops to over 1:40 seconds. It doesn’t seem to matter what SATA connections I use for any of the drives, the boot time still drops through the floor. I isolated this issue by removing every piece of hardware and adding them back until the issue was revealed to be caused by the WD hard drives.I can boot to windows without the WD drives connected (all other hardware in play) at 40 seconds.
I am running all drives with the RAID setting in my BIOS (as reccomended by MSI when using multiple ACHI drives). All drives are visible as they should be in bios, and all are seen by Windows once it is up. For the record, running in IDE mode does NOT improve the boot time, nor does it worsen it (still 1:40 seconds).
The computer is an HTPC, so the storage drives are for media, and the SSD for quick boot times. I have all appropriate drivers installed and updated, as is my mainboard bios the most recent available.
Hard drive benchmarks are exactly what they should be once windows is up, with the SSD running around 200mbs per second (read) and the 2TB disks obviously much slower, but at their stated speed. Everything is perfect once up and into Windows, it is only the boot that is affected.
My system specs:
AMD 2.8ghz dual core (AM3)
MSI 880GM-E34 motherboard
4GB DD3 Ram
Seasonic 450 Watt PSU
HD6450 graphics card
Hauppage 2250 TV tuner card
Windows 7 X64 service pack 1 + all available updates
I’ve appreacite any help. I can’t see any reason at all why Windows should take an extra minute to boot with the WD drives connected. It’s not reading any data from them–all that is on them is movies and music.
