so, just as a final update to this… while I was never able to resolve this issue completely. I will note two things:
* If you shutdown the system, with the USB 3.0 4TB drive attached and running, and the activity light on the external device turns off too… I have no startup delays, as long as I leave the power on the device and it has its’ activity light off. However, if I reboot the system, which doesn’t seem to disengage the activity light on the external device, there will be a very long startup delay. I’m guessing it is scanning the device for a boot loader. Fails (after 20 minutes), then proceeds to boot normally of the EFI partition on the DX4000 array.
* I switched external drives, and put in a Seagate Expander drive (2TB) USB 3.0 drive, and the system works normally in any scenario.
In conclusion, it believe the problem has either to do with the firmware on the larger 4TB external drive (it is a western digital ), or the AMI ROM seems to have problems quickly resolving the lack of an EFI partition on the larger drives.
