m14x boots very slow with second hdd

I just installed a secondary hdd today, followed the step here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...ll-secondary-hard-drive-your-m14x-w-pics.html
I am also using the same hdd caddy (fenvi) used in the tutorial.

Everything worked very well except the boot time now is very very slow.
The system is installed in a vertex 4 ssd, normally without the secondary hdd, the boot time is about 5-10 seconds after seeing the windows flag.

Now with the secondary hdd plug in, it took about 1-2 minutes to desktop after seeing the windows flag.
the secondary hdd i am using is the one came with the laptop. I believe it is a western digital 750g black.

The bios I am using is the modded A08 bios (with A05 sata drivers). every setting is default. (Can be found here: http://forum.techinferno.com/alienware-m14x/1786-m14x-r1-bios-a08-sata-fix.html)

Did anyone experience the same or similar problem?

 

I would try formatting the secondary HDD if you haven't already. If Windows is still installed on the HDD or something it could be messing with the system.

If you already have:

did you install Intel Rapid Storage technology?

and

try updating your SSD to the latest firmware

 

Thanks for the reply.
The system partition on the HDD is already formatted. It now only contains my data.
Intel Rapid Storage Technology is already installed, prior to install the second HDD.
The SSD is with the latest firmware. I can boot with the SSD only with no problem at all. Everything is smooth with just the SSD. As soon as I add in the second HDD, the boot takes about 3 mins. But right after in the desktop, it becomes fast.

 

Does the BIOS boot slow as well? If so, then its something with your physical parts. If not, it may be just software related in terms of what Windows is reading and it could be fixable with reformatting and messing with drive settings

 

I am going through this exact experience right now although with a different laptop - a Dell Vostro 1500. After much research I am confident that my problem lies with the good old primary/secondary ATA jumper settings and auto detection crap. This is because the interface to the DVDRW drive I had is PATA/IDE and although the caddy translates this to SATA, the system still sees and expects a PATA device. Then Dell's raw BIOS in conjunction with non-flexible mainboard design mix things up during the OS detection.

Substantiation:

• Googling delay during windows startup shows a lot of results on this primary/secondary
• My interface is indeed PATA/IDE
• Drive works brilliantly once Windows is up and running
• Same delay is experienced when loading the Windows setup/installation

Unfortunately there is no way I can see where to manually force primary or secondary on the caddy's module so I think I may just need to either learn to live with this boot-up delay or else venture on some mini PCIe SATA controller, risking that it would not be supported by Dell's BIOS/mainboard anyway.

I will try swapping the drive locations (SSD in caddy, HDD in default bay) just for the sake of having tried all I can think of and will post the result for the sake of those reading this thread.

 

Although this seemed to drastically reduce the boot delay it did not make much sense to limit my 300Mb/s SATA SSD to UDMA mode 5 transfer speed (100Mb/s) so opting out of this workaround for now.

 

I had the same problem. I couldn't figure out for the life of me why my SSD was so slow with my Seagate hard drive in my laptop. I was about to give up when I found a jumper I had laying around. I used the jumper to force my HDD into 1.5 SATA speeds. Everything works brilliantly now! It's a thought!

 

For some reason, I cannot boot into the es-tool usb drive. (stuck at booting es-tools screen). It seemed there was no other way to change the HDD to run at sata150 other than setting the jumper.
The thing is I do not have any micro-jumper for the 2.5" hdd. Does anyone know if there is other ways to set it manually at sata 150?

 

can you please let me know which two to short?

 

It depends on the hard drive I believe. This is for Seagate.

 

I have the WD Scorpio Black 750G HDD.
I cant find any document shows the jumper setting for such hdd.
The only one I can find is , but there is no option for sata 150...


I found on the wd website says

Does it mean I need to buy a seagate drive?

 

It looks like you can only lock it to 1.5mb/s for the 3.5in size HDD's (Desktop). I'm not sure if Ultimate Boot CD has a WD tool. It didn't have a Seagate tool to force it into 1.5 speeds. A Samsung or Seagate HDD would probably be your best best.

 

Limiting the transfer mode to 1.5gb/s solved the problem. I tried with a older sata 1.5gb/s only hdd, it ran with no problem at all.
I also tried the es-tool, unfortunately it only works for samsung drives.
Too bad there is no way to force 1.5gb/s on any wd portable drives.