My primary drive is an SSD but i have 3 hard drives for storage. But when i connect even a single hard drive, my post takes around 14 seconds ("Last BIOS time" in task manager). Without any HDD, its 2-3 seconds. This is regardless of the OS.

I've tried all possible settings, but nothing seems to change this behavior. I've seen other PCs where adding an HDD to the system makes no difference. I've posted on several forums but no one seems to have knowledge on this subject.
Would it be possible to MOD the BIOS somehow to make the firmware SKIP waiting for HDDs to get ready and get on with booting?

My Specs:
ASRock z87 Killer
Intel COre i5 4570
SSD: Kingston V300
HDDs: Caviar black 1tb, caviar green 2tb, seagate barracude 500gb


Here are videos to demonstrate.
Without HDDs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHDOYJdQq5U

With HDDs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5pPs3ihEYw

Zitat

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Are all HDDs connected to Intel SATA3 ports?

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Yes, there is only one controller, all drives are connected to it

Zitat

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Have you tried to connect just one of the HDDs to find out, which HDD takes so much time for its initialization?

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Yes, of my 3 drives, the 1tb caviar black is the oldest, bought around 3-4 years ago, the caviar green 2tb came around 2 years ago and the seagate 500gb is the most recent one, bought a few months ago. The two WD caviar drives each have the same effect, extending POST time to around 13-14 seconds, the seagate drive extends the time to around 8 seconds when used alone.

Zitat

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Is your PSU good and strong enough to give all 4 drives the needed power while booting?

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Yes, its a Silverstone 750w 80 plus gold PSU, i was running a GTX 680 on it with no problems. Currently, im using onboard graphics.



EDIT: During the waiting period, the BIOS code shown is A2.
EDIT 2: Also, @Fernando you have a similar config, could you tell me what your "Last BIOS time" is under the startup tab of Task Manager?

Zitat

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My "Last BIOS time": 3,9 Seconds

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How is that possible, even a single drive pushes mine to over 6 seconds. My Seagate drive reports a spinup time of 0ms in SMART, caviar black is 8600ms , green is 6400ms.

There has to be some way to skip waiting for the drives to get ready and proceed with booting!

Is your drive a caviar green? and is this from a shutdown state or did you restart your pc?

And by drive repair do you mean disk error checking ?

im so frustrated that this is only happening to me. Since you're the bios guru, can you think of anything that might have an affect on this? the Intel ME in the bios? Satadriver?

Last night i tried updating satadriver from vs 12.7 to 12.9, updated the GOP, nothing helped.

By ME firmware do you mean whatever is in the UEFI ? ME analyzer says that its version 9.0.xxx, will updating that help? I already have the latest OS drivers

UPDATE: Updated ME firmware from v9.0.30.1482 to v9.0.31.1487, still no change.

Zitat

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Which "Fast Boot" settings have chosen within the BIOS?
Have you ever tried another option?

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I've tried them all, disabled with CSM enabled/disabled, Fast and Ultra Fast. Neither seem to speed up this process.
I guess my best bet would be to sell my hard drives and get a single high capacity one

Zitat

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Is there an optical drive attached to your system? If yes, have you ever tried to unplug it?

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Nope

Zitat

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Before you do that, you should check your other hardware components.

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I've tried disconnecting everything, even keyboard and mouse, but the only thing that speeds up POST is removing the hard drives.
Check the videos i posted in the OP, without the hard drives, it boots almost instantly.