WD WD20EARX slows system's down?

[philwill]

Hey,

So I've got a reasonable build PC which has been fast enough for what I want. For a while I was using a Kingston SSD which was going at a 2.0Gb speed. I got hold of a WD 2.0TB drive (WD20EARX - SATA / 64MB Cache) to go with my other two HDDs and a Patriot Pyro SE 120GB. Anytime that the WD drive is in play in any combination of SATA ports I get slow load-in times from when the Windows 7 splash pops up. I use the WD as a data-drive, my primary OS drive is the patriot with my older Kingston used as a Program Files drive for games. Without the WD connected at all I get 9 seconds from the splash-screen to being in Windows; with the WD I'm looking at 31 seconds.
I know my mobo isn't the most up-to-date model, I'm wondering if the problem is actually just a Motherboard limitation?

Motherboard is Gigabyte GA-890XA-UD3.

Just wondering if there's anything that I could look into to remedy this issue.

Thanks!

 

[Dereck47]

In BIOS make sure your 1st boot device is your O/S drive (Patriot).
If you have options for 2nd & 3rd boot devices then set them to "Disabled".

Also, make sure your SATA ports are in AHCI mode for best performance.

 

[philwill]

Hey Dereck,
Yeah, my Pyro is first in the boot-order. Setting the Ports to AHCI was the first thing I did as I believe that not doing this can lead to complications/BSOD.

Like I say; no matter where I connect this drive it has an adverse effect on my Primary SSD.

One thing I did wonder is that sometimes the drives have an M or S next to them during post; I'm assuming that this denotes whether they are Master/Slave. I'd looked into seeing if I could "force" the drive to operate as a Slave seeing as how it has the Jumper pins exposed by the connectors. Looking at WD's website it appears that these are for SSC and Opti (at least I think it's Opti).