ASROCK 990FX Extreme 9 and Seagate SSHD problem

[richard_o]

I have recently upgraded my second drive from an Hitachi 2TB HD to a 4TB Seagate SSHD. It is connected to the third SATA3 port, the second is taken by my Pioneer SATA Blu-Ray Writer BDR-209M. The Corsair SSD is on the first SATA port.

I have the following problems with this configuration.

With Fast Boot enabled, the second drive (D:\) would disappear. Didn't matter when, it would always disappear. Sometimes at boot, sometimes in the middle of doing anything on the PC. Gaming, browsing, encoding, it didn't matter what was happening. Occasionally you would get through a session with this not happening.

Then a week or so ago I noticed it was not there at boot for a few days, as I have an SSD for the boot drive, with my paging file on the D:\ drive, Windows (8.1) would always warn that it had created a temporary paging file on the C:\ drive, as the D:\ drive was not available. On that occasion I entered the BIOS, and turned on the AMD AHCI BIOS ROM, thinking it may help. It did, for that boot, but after that the POST would stop with error 62, chipset initialisation error. This required resetting the CMOS to get it to boot.

I entered the BIOS, turned off the AHCI BIOS ROM, and I also left Fast Boot disabled. After that, no more problems, until I decided to turn fast boot on again. Once I did that, Windows would do a check disk each and every boot. Turn it off and no problems.

So, my question is, has anyone else had problems with SSHD's with this board or BIOS? Is it related to the 4TB size? Or are there any other thoughts? I obviously have turned Fast Boot off, but as it does make a real difference in boot time, even with an SSD boot drive, I would like to turn it back on.

Richard

[parsec]

Re: ASROCK 990FX Extreme 9 and Seagate SSHD problem

I've never seen any posts about problems with hybrid SSHD drives with your board or any others. I have seen posts about drive problems when using the Fast Boot option. I've also experienced them myself with a different board. I checked into this a bit and think I have an explanation that is related to the Fast Boot option.

"Booting" a PC is in general two separate steps, the POST process and the actual process of loading and running the OS. If you have the small POST code beep speaker on your board, you can tell when POST ends and the true booting of the OS begins. The single beep signifies the end and successful completion of the POST process. The time between pressing the power button on the PC and that beep is in general the length of the POST process. The time from that beep until the desktop appears is the actual time of booting the OS.

Why am I describing this? I believe I found that enabling Fast Boot really shortens the POST process. The time of booting the OS is the same, or hardly any shorter.

Part of POST is testing and initializing the drives. That part is usually done as one of if not the last part of POST. That's done for several reasons, including giving the drives time to get started. HDDs take longer than SSDs to start up. Older mother boards had a BIOS option that let you set a time period that would cause POST to wait for drives to spin up. A board I had with that option could set the wait time to as much as 30 seconds.

My theory is the Fast Boot option shortens the POST process by removing some of the wait times for hardware to get started. It may also shorten some of the POST procedures, or possibly ignore some warnings or minor errors that might occur because of the shorter POST. I've seen other side affects of this, such as some of the fan speed readings of fans connected to the board not appearing in monitoring programs. If I restart the PC, the fan speed readings would then appear.

If I use the Ultra Fast option, after a few cold starts of the PC, I would also see chkdsk being run. That was on high quality SSDs used as the OS drive. It would happen on cold starts, so not just once or twice. I had no HDDs or optical drives in that PC. I never saw one run of chkdsk before using Ultra Fast. If I then set Fast Boot to Disabled, the chkdsk runs stopped immediately and have not happened once since then.

So what can you do about your problem? Not much. I have had other PCs with different ASRock boards and different drive configurations that did not have any disk issues when using Fast Boot. In the PC with the chkdsk situation, I have two RAID 0 arrays of SSDs, and a single SSD OS drive. The RAID arrays take a little longer to get started, and I am using every Intel SATA III port on that board. The other PC had fewer drives and only one RAID array at different times.

I've never found a workaround or fix for this issue. IMO it is odd the optical drive is recognized fine, which is your E: drive, right? But being a new BluRay player must help. Your SSHD may take longer to start up since in a sense it is two drives in one. I assume it is formatted as GPT. The SSHD disappearing long after the PC booted is strange, I never had that problem. Put a new SATA data cable on it and remove and plug the power connector back in again.

[richard_o]

Re: ASROCK 990FX Extreme 9 and Seagate SSHD problem

Parsec,

Thanks for the reply. I agree with you on your summation of the Fast Boot compromising the drive wait time. I have had many boards over the years, since my first PC in 1994 (Pentium 66), and needed to tweak the drive wait time on more than one occasion.

Yes, it is formatted as GPT. Yes, the optical drive is E:\.

The problem with putting a new SATA cable on it is the case, the Carbide 540 has two 3.5" racks with both power and SATA in a header for the drive to engage when it slides into the slot. But I will investigate the possibility, or at least try it in the other slot. Time to get the torch out, or at least the manual.

I may also reflash the BIOS, I have been having a few stops in the POST, a couple tonight for instance, where the error was with the Intel network boot ROM (displayed on the monitor). At the time the on board LED display for the POST was blacked out, along with the reset and power buttons on the board beside the LED display.

Any thoughts on the order of devices on the SATA connectors? I believe the SSHD is the third device.

Thanks again for your assistance.

Richard

I've never seen any posts about problems with hybrid SSHD drives with your board or any others. I have seen posts about drive problems when using the Fast Boot option. I've also experienced them myself with a different board. I checked into this a bit and think I have an explanation that is related to the Fast Boot option.

"Booting" a PC is in general two separate steps, the POST process and the actual process of loading and running the OS. If you have the small POST code beep speaker on your board, you can tell when POST ends and the true booting of the OS begins. The single beep signifies the end and successful completion of the POST process. The time between pressing the power button on the PC and that beep is in general the length of the POST process. The time from that beep until the desktop appears is the actual time of booting the OS.

Why am I describing this? I believe I found that enabling Fast Boot really shortens the POST process. The time of booting the OS is the same, or hardly any shorter.

Part of POST is testing and initializing the drives. That part is usually done as one of if not the last part of POST. That's done for several reasons, including giving the drives time to get started. HDDs take longer than SSDs to start up. Older mother boards had a BIOS option that let you set a time period that would cause POST to wait for drives to spin up. A board I had with that option could set the wait time to as much as 30 seconds.

My theory is the Fast Boot option shortens the POST process by removing some of the wait times for hardware to get started. It may also shorten some of the POST procedures, or possibly ignore some warnings or minor errors that might occur because of the shorter POST. I've seen other side affects of this, such as some of the fan speed readings of fans connected to the board not appearing in monitoring programs. If I restart the PC, the fan speed readings would then appear.

If I use the Ultra Fast option, after a few cold starts of the PC, I would also see chkdsk being run. That was on high quality SSDs used as the OS drive. It would happen on cold starts, so not just once or twice. I had no HDDs or optical drives in that PC. I never saw one run of chkdsk before using Ultra Fast. If I then set Fast Boot to Disabled, the chkdsk runs stopped immediately and have not happened once since then.

So what can you do about your problem? Not much. I have had other PCs with different ASRock boards and different drive configurations that did not have any disk issues when using Fast Boot. In the PC with the chkdsk situation, I have two RAID 0 arrays of SSDs, and a single SSD OS drive. The RAID arrays take a little longer to get started, and I am using every Intel SATA III port on that board. The other PC had fewer drives and only one RAID array at different times.

I've never found a workaround or fix for this issue. IMO it is odd the optical drive is recognized fine, which is your E: drive, right? But being a new BluRay player must help. Your SSHD may take longer to start up since in a sense it is two drives in one. I assume it is formatted as GPT. The SSHD disappearing long after the PC booted is strange, I never had that problem. Put a new SATA data cable on it and remove and plug the power connector back in again.

[parsec]

Re: ASROCK 990FX Extreme 9 and Seagate SSHD problem

Parsec,

Thanks for the reply. I agree with you on your summation of the Fast Boot compromising the drive wait time. I have had many boards over the years, since my first PC in 1994 (Pentium 66), and needed to tweak the drive wait time on more than one occasion.

Yes, it is formatted as GPT. Yes, the optical drive is E:\.

The problem with putting a new SATA cable on it is the case, the Carbide 540 has two 3.5" racks with both power and SATA in a header for the drive to engage when it slides into the slot. But I will investigate the possibility, or at least try it in the other slot. Time to get the torch out, or at least the manual.

I may also reflash the BIOS, I have been having a few stops in the POST, a couple tonight for instance, where the error was with the Intel network boot ROM (displayed on the monitor). At the time the on board LED display for the POST was blacked out, along with the reset and power buttons on the board beside the LED display.

Any thoughts on the order of devices on the SATA connectors? I believe the SSHD is the third device.

Thanks again for your assistance.

Richard

That stop in POST and the black out of the Dr Debug display is strange, I've never seen or heard of that before. Besides reflashing the BIOS, I don't know what else to do about that. I've always used Instant Flash with the BIOS file on a USB flash drive, if you don't use that method, give it a try.

I didn't know the Carbide 540 had hot-swap bays. I've seen a few forum threads where people had problems with SSDs and hot-swap bays. NOT specifically with the Carbide 540, but a few other cases, one was the Cooler Master HAF XB. The problems were drive recognition issues, but not related to using Fast Boot. I recall I suggested trying a regular SATA data and power cable connection to the SSD, and it solved the problem more than once. I'm not saying that would fix your problem, but normally when a drive is not seen when using Fast Boot, it won't appear at all when the PC boots. I've never had a drive disappear after the PC booted when it was recognized just after booting when using Fast Boot.

I think the order of the drive testing and connection is done in the order of the port numbers, 0 being first, etc. If the SSHD is already on the third SATA port, then it is the last drive processed during POST. I would double check the port numbers for each drive just in case you can move the SSHD to be on the last port used.

Actually, I did an experiment after my previous post. I have a RAID 0 array of three SSDs, SanDisk Extreme II's. I set Fast Boot to Ultra Fast in the UEFI (I can use that with my OS configuration) and after booting the PC, shut it down. The worst case situation is a cold start with Windows 8.1, since the Windows Fast Startup feature only works from a cold boot/start up.

I know how long the length of my usual POST time is with Fast Boot disabled. When I started the PC with Ultra Fast, the single POST Ok beep occurred in under three seconds. Of course that was much shorter than usual. From that beep, it actually took longer for the OS to boot than it does with Fast Boot disabled! (I never tried Fast Boot with my Z97 board, but I've used it on a Z87 and Z77 board.)

The main thing that happened is after booting, the RAID 0 array I mentioned above was missing from Windows Explorer, Disk Management, etc. I restarted into the UEFI, disabled Fast Boot, save and exit, and after booting that RAID 0 array was back and worked fine.

It seems some drives or drive configurations are not fast enough to allow the use of Fast Boot. I imagine this option is provided by the source of the UEFI, AMI, and not something that a mobo manufacture can implement.

[richard_o]

Re: ASROCK 990FX Extreme 9 and Seagate SSHD problem

Parsec,

The stop in POST was a concern. Just after I sent the reply to you I heard the SSHD drop off (I assume it is the auto-park, if they still do that), and it disappeared from explorer.

I shut down, moved it to the second drive bay, and haven't had a problem since. Only time will tell if that was the issue or not. Fast boot remains disabled. Interesting experiment of yours, sounds like it proves your theory.

I keep checking for a firmware update to my Seagate SSHD, but at this stage there is nothing available.

I'm thinking it's time to move on from my AMD rig, my processor is two or more years old, although the board is great. I don't think AMD will be offering me anything other than the 9590 at 4.7 GHz, which I could probably get this rig up to for no cost other than a couple hours of tweaking.

Thanks again for your replies.

Richard

That stop in POST and the black out of the Dr Debug display is strange, I've never seen or heard of that before. Besides reflashing the BIOS, I don't know what else to do about that. I've always used Instant Flash with the BIOS file on a USB flash drive, if you don't use that method, give it a try.

I didn't know the Carbide 540 had hot-swap bays. I've seen a few forum threads where people had problems with SSDs and hot-swap bays. NOT specifically with the Carbide 540, but a few other cases, one was the Cooler Master HAF XB. The problems were drive recognition issues, but not related to using Fast Boot. I recall I suggested trying a regular SATA data and power cable connection to the SSD, and it solved the problem more than once. I'm not saying that would fix your problem, but normally when a drive is not seen when using Fast Boot, it won't appear at all when the PC boots. I've never had a drive disappear after the PC booted when it was recognized just after booting when using Fast Boot.

I think the order of the drive testing and connection is done in the order of the port numbers, 0 being first, etc. If the SSHD is already on the third SATA port, then it is the last drive processed during POST. I would double check the port numbers for each drive just in case you can move the SSHD to be on the last port used.

Actually, I did an experiment after my previous post. I have a RAID 0 array of three SSDs, SanDisk Extreme II's. I set Fast Boot to Ultra Fast in the UEFI (I can use that with my OS configuration) and after booting the PC, shut it down. The worst case situation is a cold start with Windows 8.1, since the Windows Fast Startup feature only works from a cold boot/start up.

I know how long the length of my usual POST time is with Fast Boot disabled. When I started the PC with Ultra Fast, the single POST Ok beep occurred in under three seconds. Of course that was much shorter than usual. From that beep, it actually took longer for the OS to boot than it does with Fast Boot disabled! (I never tried Fast Boot with my Z97 board, but I've used it on a Z87 and Z77 board.)

The main thing that happened is after booting, the RAID 0 array I mentioned above was missing from Windows Explorer, Disk Management, etc. I restarted into the UEFI, disabled Fast Boot, save and exit, and after booting that RAID 0 array was back and worked fine.

It seems some drives or drive configurations are not fast enough to allow the use of Fast Boot. I imagine this option is provided by the source of the UEFI, AMI, and not something that a mobo manufacture can implement.