Did you know "single" Hard Drive Booted Faster?

grandamp3 · 07-12-2004, 02:02 AM

Ok guys... I wasnt aware of this so I assume others are not either, at least someone else on here doesnt know it. At any rate, Ive been messing around with my brand new motherboard I got in over the weekend. At different times while fooling around with it, I noticed I had the POST going in as little as like 5 seconds. This is a brand new hard drive so I was impressed but at the same time I almost expected it.

Well, after fooling around with it a bit more, putting my MP3Car hard drive in my home system and adding new songs to it, I then put my car hard drive back into my car system and "wtf, it takes POST 25 seconds"

. The bad part was that it still only took the normal time to do the actual tests of POST, but then after that it would say "Wait..." and just sit there for 15-20 seconds. I fooled around with every BIOS setting that it possibly could be and to no avail, it still took 25 seconds

.

Then I remembered about the only thing that had changed was that I had put my hard drive in my home system PC. I checked out the jumper settings on the hard drive and saw that when I pulled it back to put in car PC, I set the jumper as master. So I just simply jumpered it so that it was set as a "single" drive and booted back up again. Well, to my surprise, again it was back at a 5 second POST. I tested, retested and tested some more and that was the only thing that effected it to drag it out.

I assume that basically even though its a Master drive, and the BIOS is told to not look for other drives, it still looks for a slave if it has a master. Basically just thought Id share this with everyone. I know back in my 1.0 system I was always trying to speed up the POST after it ran all the tests. Now, even on my old mobo I bet that this would help it dramatically as well. In any regard, I hope someones this and is helped by it.

GruvThang · 07-12-2004, 02:27 AM

Worth looking into, to say the least!!!

Thanks!

dominic · 07-12-2004, 02:56 AM

sounds interesting.....

one question, how do you set your hard drive to single drive? all the ones i have ever seen have 3 jumper settings, Master (M), Slave (S), and Cable Select (CS)?

do you just mean cable select, or no jumpers at all??

GruvThang · 07-12-2004, 03:01 AM

I took it to mean Master instead of Cable Select.

I just found this:

http://seagate.com/support/kb/disc/r..._settings.html

kgasso · 07-12-2004, 03:30 AM

If your BIOS allows it, I'd suggest just setting the HDD parameters by hand. No more boot-up searching for EIDE devices is often a major speed improvement. If your BIOS supports it, "Fast POST" or "Quick POST" helps a lot, too. Turning off autodetection on the floppy seems to make things go a smidge quicker as well.

Right now my CarPC goes from power-switch to media app (including network initilization) in 17 seconds flat.

Yuriy · 07-12-2004, 03:51 AM

Blah! 17 seconds is nothing!
I got 17 minutes!

oh wait..

GruvThang · 07-12-2004, 04:54 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by Yuriy

Blah! 17 seconds is nothing!
I got 17 minutes!
oh wait..

At least you have it booting, mine is still in pieces. I am working with days not minutes

I do belive that the first boot is usually the hardest, though!

Aftaab001 · 07-12-2004, 05:46 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by Yuriy

Blah! 17 seconds is nothing!
I got 17 minutes!

oh wait..

be strong!!! don't let it get to you!

Enforcer · 07-12-2004, 05:48 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by dominic

sounds interesting.....

one question, how do you set your hard drive to single drive? all the ones i have ever seen have 3 jumper settings, Master (M), Slave (S), and Cable Select (CS)?

do you just mean cable select, or no jumpers at all??

Not all brands have the 'single' option

EBFoxbat · 07-12-2004, 05:59 AM

Wth CS jumped, most motherboardslook,for a while,for a second drive. If the drive has pins to be jumped for SINGLE, then MASTER will also look for a second drive. On my desktop it's about a 10 second difference.

Quote:

I'd suggest just setting the HDD parameters by hand

I find this to make a HUGE difference. Becasue (as said) the BIOS won't look for a hard drive, it'll just assume it has what you tell it it as. A word of caution though. Manual seting of HD parameters must be done correctly, you won't damage anything but you can get some funny results... like data writting over data. And DON'T FORGET you set it like this when you're scratching you're head for hours after you put in a second or a new HDD.

I added a second hardrive to a friends Dell and it took me about an hour to realize it. When I AUTO detect the HDD the BIOS displays info just like it was entered by hand, so I overlooked it about 37 times.

grandamp3 · 07-12-2004, 09:11 AM

My hard drive is a Western Digital and on it, it has 10 pins (5 sets of 2 across). For Master, you are suppose to jumper the two pins in the middle, we'll call them 5&6. For Slave you jumper the ones next to it, 3&4. But for Single, you jumper 4&6.

http://support.wdc.com/techinfo/general/jumpers.asp
^^^^^Mine is a 10 pin configuration

I believe though that Single is different than Master, its Different obvious than slave, and as well is different to Cable Select. Again, i think someone mentoined that only certain hard drives had it as an option, but if you have a western digital (all of my WDs have it) then you should have it as an option and would recommend testing with it.

PS This is all done with my hard drive being told what it is in the BIOS (auto-detect once) and my other primary & slaves being told "Not Installed".

DarquePervert · 07-12-2004, 09:26 AM

The drives that have the setting for a SINGLE drive basically close the loop on whichever wires are used to detect the drive's setting.
This will speed up boot times. Also, if you have a drive set to SINGLE and have another HDD ont he same cable behind it, it won't be detected.
Been burned by this before.

Another way to speed up boot times is to set your IDE channels that have no drives on them to NONE in your BIOS setup. If the BIOS is set to NONE it's not even going to look for a drive on that channel.
Turning off FDD seek & FDD swap and enabling the QUICK POST options will also speed up boot times as well.

turbochris · 07-12-2004, 10:11 AM

anyone try setting the unused channels to NONE in the device manager in 2K or XP?

Plinkey · 07-12-2004, 08:01 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by Enforcer

Not all brands have the 'single' option

I know that on some drives, like WD, come in the 'single' config, if the drive doesn't say it, its usually with no jumper, or you can just put the jumper horizontally across random pins....this is handy if you have a single drive and set it to master, and the bios wont recognize it.

It also may speed boot times to disable the ide channels that you dont use in the bios.

-Plinkey

Gruneun · 07-13-2004, 12:24 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by dominic

sounds interesting.....

one question, how do you set your hard drive to single drive? all the ones i have ever seen have 3 jumper settings, Master (M), Slave (S), and Cable Select (CS)?

do you just mean cable select, or no jumpers at all??

On the drive itself, the jumpers for Master and Single are usually the same. He means changing a BIOS setting that tells the motherboard not to look for another drive. Otherwise, the BIOS quickly finds the drive and spends additional time polling for a possible second drive. By explicitly telling it not to look for a second drive, that time isn't wasted.