Slow Boot Up Time

[STC]

will do. no-one really answered the other question, if we don't like the pci sata expansion card (and i agree, i'd prefer not to have it) am i really limited to OS drive, optical drive and 3 X internal hard drives? how else can i hook up other HDDs? even most NAS's are limited to 4 disks and i still don't want to go back down that route...

There are quite a few boards that have up to eight SATA ports. You pay the premium, but they are around. Most of them are boards with another controller chipset controlling a few other ports and linked via the same bus that you would plug your external card into. Essentially it could be said that there's not much difference to what you have now.

For instance, the Intel X58 chipset controls six SATA ports natively and the slightly old but perfectly formed Asus P6X58D has this and an additional two ports presented via a Marvel controller to the left of the Southbridge.

[newfiend]

will do. no-one really answered the other question, if we don't like the pci sata expansion card (and i agree, i'd prefer not to have it) am i really limited to OS drive, optical drive and 3 X internal hard drives? how else can i hook up other HDDs? even most NAS's are limited to 4 disks and i still don't want to go back down that route...

There are quite a few boards that have eight SATA ports. You pay the premium, but they are around.

There is always larger storage solutions.. 3TB drives are out there.. you pay big $$ for them as well but they are available. As with everything else capacity will get larger on HDD's. and the price will eventually come down. It's all about what you need right now.
newfiend~

[bobbob]

yeah, just bought my first 3Tb this year,prices for them are reasonable now but its still not enough. the 5Tb drive has been expected for some time, i need one now!

[newfiend]

yeah, just bought my first 3Tb this year,prices for them are reasonable now but its still not enough. the 5Tb drive has been expected for some time, i need one now!

Stop trying to DL the entire internet bobbob... Leave some for the rest of us!

[WarrenH]

Sorry, bit late to the post, from my experience, It's the AHCI mode and the eSata drives, try removing the eSata drives and you'll notice an immediate difference. Unfortunately you have to use AHCI of you're on SSD and / or eSata.

[bobbob]

disconnecting the esata drive is an option i think as i can then just use the USB connection for all three drives.

thanks for all the responses guys, i'm away for a week now, but when i get back i'll take a look at all of this.

[JTScribe]

Is UEFI enabled? I have a Sandy Bridge desktop with an SSD and it boots stupid fast. I mean probably less than 30 seconds total.

[bobbob]

ok, so i played around with the bios and did a complete reinstall of windows. i can now get into the desktop in about 50s but this is with nothing installed and only the PCIe tv tuner card present. it still seems long compared to what some seem to be achieving.

i found some time could be saved by making the HDD the primary boot device rather than the CD. RAM settings were correctly auto detected but i set them manually anyway. i was looking at disabling the IDE detection but it seems this also disables SATA detection. There is an option for "quick boot" which i have enabled but there is no documentation on it in the manual. I have to choose EFI DVD boot option because i have a 3Tb drive. SMART capability is enabled but didn't make any difference. SATA mode is set to ACHI, i was able to disabled detection of USB storage at POST but couldn't see anything else that could be changed. i also updated the bios

after installing basic drivers and updates the windows experience comes out at 6.4 which is brought down by the onboard graphics. without that the lowest score is 7.0 for primary hard disk.

the biggest delay seems to be the POST screen coming up initially. its 10s before i see anything on screen. i guess this must just be one of the "unique" features of my motherboard!

going to try introducing the SATA expansion card next

[bobbob]

actually the sata expansion card made virtually no difference. attaching the external USB drives adds another 30s

[newfiend]

What SSD are you using? Does it support 6 Gbps? and is it hooked up to one of the two 6 Gbps ports?

After updating the BIOS did you clear the CMOS (set to defaults and save and exit the BIOS) and set up the BIOS again?

Making the SSD the Primary boot device will save some boot time as I am sure you noticed as well as disabling ports not needed.

I think you have done most of what you can to increase your boot speeds on that system. Your RAM is limited to 1333 on that board.
If your SSD is limited to only 3Gbps you might loose a small bit of performance there as well. You have a lot hooked up to that system when all the software and harware is attached and installed which surely makes it take longer to start up and bring things online (external HDD's etc). I used this board for mine http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... li%20micro
The Memory speed supported is DDR3 1066/1333/1600/1866/2133. I used the Corsair Vengeance CMZ8GX3M2A2133C11R RAM and was able to set it manually at 11-11-11-27 @ 1.5v @ 1866 with out overclocking the processor which gave me a small boost and I used a Corsair Force GT 90 GB 6Gbps SSD.. It boots pretty quick but I also do not have all the extra hardware (internal and external) you have. I also only have about 9 system tray apps running maximum.
I guess my suggestion would be sleep the PC instead of rebooting it as much as possible. It should wake much quicker than rebooting it on a regular basis. I use MST to aid in my HTPC sleep process and have it set to reboot the PC once a day at night while we're sleeping. I rarely have to reboot the thing manually. You may have just reached the harware limitations of your Motherbaord/Ram/SSD performance Vs. your hardware/software needs.

newfiend~

[STC]

...attaching the external USB drives adds another 30s

Wow.

[newfiend]

...attaching the external USB drives adds another 30s

Wow.

There is a USB Hotfix from MS.. I applied it on the suggestion of CETON for my USB InfiniTV I had.. You could try adding that and see if things improve.. It seemed to me that USB devices seem to take longer to come online than before with the hotfix for me though.. If you want to try the Hotfix you can grab that here : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2683549

newfiend~

[bobbob]

well its this SSD http://www.ocztechnology.com/ocz-agilit ... d-eol.html it is now connected to one of the 6Gb connectors, not sure about before.

yes i did clear the CMOS before re-setting up the bios

no, i'm not interested in upgrading any of the hardware, i know i can cut it back down to 1 min if i exlcuded the external drives (and i have newfiend's possible fix for that) and i'm happy with this. i did preface all of this by saying i hardly ever reboot so expending more effort and £'s in the hope of reducing the monthly reboot time by a minute doesn't seem sensible!

anyway thanks for your input

[newfiend]

well its this SSD http://www.ocztechnology.com/ocz-agilit ... d-eol.html it is now connected to one of the 6Gb connectors, not sure about before.

It looks to me that that SSD is SATA II. Which is limited to 3 Gbp/s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA
You could add a newer SSD later that is SATA III instead, as it supports the full 6Gbp/s. and get a small bump in performance hooking that to a 6Gbp/s port.
Like you said though it's not worth spending money on upgrading quite yet though. Maybe it could be an addition later where you could move the OCZ drive to another PC needing a boot drive then upgrade the HTPC SSD..?
It's just going to boot a small amount slower than some other users systems with hardware that can be tweaked a bit more than yours. Really,..with all you have hooked up it isn't too bad.. You're loading a lot of software and bringing a lot of drives online and unfortunately that may take a bit.

newfiend~