LSI 9300-16i enormous boot time

[DARBADARBZ]

I have an LSI SAS 9300-16i with 10 drives installed. These drives are in a software RAID for Steam/Epic/Xbox install folders. No boot files anything on them.

 

Before installing the card, my boot time was under 5 seconds. Now Task Manager says 46.3 seconds, but it feels even longer than that.

[Zando_]

Sounds about right. Adding more things to initialize = longer boot time. 

[Alex Atkin UK]

7 minutes ago, DARBADARBZ said:

I have an LSI SAS 9300-16i with 10 drives installed. These drives are in a software RAID for Steam/Epic/Xbox install folders. No boot files anything on them.

 

Before installing the card, my boot time was under 5 seconds. Now Task Manager says 46.3 seconds, but it feels even longer than that.

Boot or POST?

On Linux with an LSI SAS2008 boot seems about the same as ever for me, but POST takes a lot longer as it seems to go through some sort of test of the drives before booting.  I assume this is a legacy of them being Hardware RAID cards flashed into HBA mode.

[da na]

POST takes a great deal of time with SAS HBA cards, enabling the LSI MegaRAID on my HP z840 workstation lengthens the POST time by a good 25-30 seconds as it initializes firmware and connected drives. 

[Alex Atkin UK]

3 minutes ago, da na said:

POST takes a great deal of time with SAS HBA cards, enabling the LSI MegaRAID on my HP z840 workstation lengthens the POST time by a good 25-30 seconds as it initializes firmware and connected drives. 

First time it scared me half to death as all the HDDs thrashed for ~15 seconds.  I thought something had gone wrong and it was trashing the drives.

[DARBADARBZ]

36 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Boot or POST?

On Linux with an LSI SAS2008 boot seems about the same as ever for me, but POST takes a lot longer as it seems to go through some sort of test of the drives before booting.  I assume this is a legacy of them being Hardware RAID cards flashed into HBA mode.

I'm not sure which one, but it sits at the UEFI setup / boot menu for a long time

[Alex Atkin UK]

3 minutes ago, DARBADARBZ said:

I'm not sure which one, but it sits at the UEFI setup / boot menu for a long time

Yup, that's the SAS firmware booting up and doing its thing during POST.  The SAS card effectively is its own computer going through its own POST and your PC has to wait for this to finish.

[DARBADARBZ]

28 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Yup, that's the SAS firmware booting up and doing its thing during POST.  The SAS card effectively is its own computer going through its own POST and your PC has to wait for this to finish.

There's no way I can disable that? In bios I have a few options for the card, I don't know if that would apply here. I'm not booting anything off any devices attached to the card.

[Zando_]

10 minutes ago, DARBADARBZ said:

There's no way I can disable that? In bios I have a few options for the card, I don't know if that would apply here. I'm not booting anything off the device for the card.

If you disable the card initializing, you won't be able to talk to the drives hooked into it, so... no, no real way to stop the card from POSTing while still being able to use it.

 

Why do you have a 10-drive array for game folders to begin with btw? Running 4 high-capacity drives off internal SATA with RAID 10 or equivalent should be plenty fast and doesn't require an HBA and the accompanying wait for it to POST.