Storage HDD Causing Slow Boot

Tough question without more info on your boot setup. My first question is what is in the BIOS setup, because it may be looking for a boot from the Samsung. BTW. I run two of those 2 TB Samsung beasts alsong with two 1.5 TB Seagates, & a 640 GB WD Caviar Black behind a Crucial 300 C SSD and I have no issues with the boot.

Crucial SSD is plugged into SATA port 0.
Samsung 2TB HDD is in SATA port 1.

Boot device priority: Optical drives, Removable Drives, Hard Disk Drives, Network

Hard Drive Order: SATA port 0 (SSD), SATA port 1 (HDD)

It shouldn't be looking to boot from the HDD. The part that it gets hung up on is the Windows 7 loading screen. Normally the animation doesn't even finish, but with the HDD hooked up it stalls for a while.

I know Samsung had released a firmware update for the HD204UI so maybe you should look into that.

Use a stopwatch and time the boot process with and without the HDD hooked up. it would be useful to know exactly what the difference is.

Installed that too. No change... Once I'm done backing it up, I'm going to run the samsung diagnostics utility. If that doesn't fix it, I guess I'll try formatting it.

With HDD plugged in: 15.43 seconds at intel boot screen, 22.99 seconds at Windows 7 loading screen, 6.35 more seconds until fully booted. Total: 44.77 seconds.

With HDD disconnected: 8.45 seconds at intel boot screen, 5.17 seconds at Windows 7 loading screen, 6.63 more seconds until fully booted. Total: 20.25 seconds.

Samsung diagnostics tool revealed no issues.

Doesn't Windows do so some diagnostics for disk health during boot up? In order for Windows explorer to have access to the files on the HDD the OS needs to check the File system before you can boot into the active OS screens. Even though we are used to them now 2TB is a lot of data and a lot of sectors. It is going to take a few seconds for all that space to be analyzed.

Same thing happens with a external hard drive. Try connecting a a large external HD and time how long it takes from when you plug it in to when it becomes available to search in explorer. I think you will see a similar but even longer effect.

Your HDD is 31x larger and has data read speed about 1/3 of your SSD. It should not be surprising that it takes a little longer to read the file system.

I think you may be right. I formatted the drive, and when it was empty, I got a total boot time of 27.73 seconds. I'm currently loading my data back onto it, but I suspect my boot time will slow down as I begin to fill it up. I'll keep you posted.

Well, after formatting and loading 445 gigs of data back onto the HDD, and I am still getting fast boots! The formatting must have done something, although I'm not sure what. The only thing I didn't load back on was a Windows backup image, but that shouldn't have had an effect.

Best answer selected by bosaki.

I wanted to note, I am having the same issues with a fresh install of windows 7, with 2 HD204UI drives full of data and movies. I unplug them and boot is lightning fast as usual, from power button on to surfing the net in 19 seconds flat. I plug them back in and it adds 20+ seconds to the boot time of the machine.

It did not do this with the original install of windows but then again, on the previous install, I put them in fresh with no data and formatted them. So that is my next step per your advice, I am backing them up and will format both and see what happens. Very frustrating as I have been chasing ghosts for a day thinking it was something with the install until I unplugged them!

I read here sometimes and i like this place. I was having this same boot issue but i don't have an ssd. after poking around on the internet i found nothing. messing around in the hardware manager i found that there was an option selected default called write caching policies under policies after you go into properties for the hard drives. all of them have this selected. after unchecking this it boots and shuts down fast as it was before. maybe faster.

shutdown time 22.5 sec
boot up about 40

hope this helps anyone that stumbles upon this like i did.