My current system has a SSD boot drive as well as a standard hard drive. Whenever I boot the system, it takes a few seconds running through some protocol before it reads "No hard disk is detected," and then proceeds to finish booting. Is it doing this because windows does not consider an SSD a hard disk? Is it not detecting my actual hard drive on bootup? Is there any way to get rid of this so I can increase my boot times?
I'm going to take a different guess; I get a similar message. The motherboard has a Marvell disk controller in addition to the southbridge ports. When I boot without any drives attached to the Marvell controller, and the controller is enabled, I get a similar message. My board is an earlier Asus model.
Look in the BIOS for on-board components and disable the Marvell controller. If that makes the message go away, you can consider leaving it disabled until you need it.
If it can't be disabled in the BIOS and you are really, really curious, disconnect your HDD and connect it to the Marvell-controlled ports. If the message goes away, I was right.
I'd check your boot priorities in your bios and make sure that the ssd is selected as your primary (master) drive. It sounds like it is checking your other drive first and reads that it doesn't have an operating system on it and then checking the next drive and sees that that has windows on it and then boots.