Curious SSD Behaviour on Maximus VI Extreme

[Oshay]

Hello, everyone.

I just gave myself a nice birthday present and upgraded my PC. I bought a Maximus 6 Extreme, with a new 4770K Haswell chip, and a nice EVGA GTX 780 video card.

All of these things are working well. Or at least, they work well when the computer will boot.

Allow me to explain further.

I have 3 drives and a Blu-Ray Optical Disk Drive in my system. They are plugged into the first four intel SATA ports on the board.

The first drive is a Kingston SSD Now 128 GB SSD, SNV425S2128GB. It runs at 3.0 GB/s
The second drive is a Seagate 500 GB HDD. It runs at 1.5 GB/s
The third is a much newer Seagate 2 TB HDD. It runs at 3.0 GB/s

The two HDDs and the Blu Ray player always post.
The SSD only posts some of the time, and when it doesn't I get a Windows BSOD (Black Screen of Death?) and a STOP error. Research on said stop error says, unsurprisingly, that the boot drive is unavailable.

After two or three hard resets using the power button, the SSD will post, and windows loads normally. I can play for as long as I want, do anything I want, and things are fine. I even ran Prime95 for eight hours, no problems.

But every time I shut down the computer and go to bed, or to work, and come home, I have to turn the computer on two or three times to get the SSD to post.

Does anyone know what could be causing this problem? It never happened on my old board (which was also an ASUS, a Sabretooth FX-990 r2.0). The SSD was not removed from the case when I installed all the new hardware, I kept the same case, the only thing I swapped out was the SATA cables to ensure that they were all good.

For the record, my power supply for all these goodies is an: ABS DARK BERET seriesDB1000-M-BRZ 1000W

I also have a second, unrelated question. From reading the manual, it seems like if you use only a single PCi-e card, it /must/ go into slot one, adjacent to the processor. That was my understanding, and so I installed it there. But it is uncomfortably close to the aftermarket heat sink I bought for my processor, and I'd like to move it down to slot 2a, if that is at all feasible. Is it, or does it have to stay in slot one?

[Classic_GOD]

Oshay wrote:
The strange thing that's happening now is that the time doesn't count up unless Windows is open.
When the PC is off, the BIOS/CMOS isn't keeping track of the time?? o_O

Turn the pc completly off (no power to the psu) then take out the CMOS battery and put it back in. AFAIK this should fix the internal clock.

[Samurai_dk]

I need a sanity check, on the Formula 6 mobo the first 4 sata ports are on the third party controller and other 6 are part of the intel controller. I have connected my SSD on the first intel plug and the rest of my drives on intel-2,3,4 and 5. I ignored the first 4 SATA ports because they are on the third party controller. Is this treatment correct, and if so are there performance differences between the intel and third party controller? I have had zero problems with my SSD and other drivers/optical.

[Oshay]

Yeah, I did the same thing. My problem was, as the others stated, that my Solid State Drive was older than dirt. It was a first gen drive, It wasn't even SATA 3, it was only SATA 2. Now that I've gotten rid of it, my system boots up no problem, no delays.

[Nodens]

This is exactly what you should do Samurai_dk. Always use the native controller only unless you need more ports. In that case connect storage drives to the third party controller or optical drives as it's always slower than the native Intel one.

[Samurai_dk]

Nodens wrote:
This is exactly what you should do Samurai_dk. Always use the native controller only unless you need more ports. In that case connect storage drives to the third party controller or optical drives as it's always slower than the native Intel one.

Thanks for the reply!

[HiVizMan]

Some of the slow boot issues are to do with compatibility issues wth first gen and some second gen SSD controllers and newer CPUs. The processor just takes forever to try and work it out. Sometimes it will work and you boot or the boot is slow and for some folks the SSD just will not work at all.

[Oshay]

Thanks for the help, Classic_GOD. That did the trick. I had to take the video card out to get at the battery (it's right beside the first PCI_e slot), so I stuck the GTX 780 into Slot 2a while I was at it.

Everything's working beautifully now. Airflow's good, time is working properly now thanks to battery pull and replace, and the system is blazing along.