UEFI boot and multiple HDD's

[Unique]

on my current setups i use the old fashioned bios boot options, and i have a number of HDD's and SATA controllers, so whilst i have all settings tweaked and a SSD, the longest part of the boot process is going through all the HDD's and SATA controllers

if i get a new build pc with UEFI, will this slowdown still occur or does UEFI do this quicker or bypass it? or am i still going to be stuck with that bottleneck so an upgrade won't speed the boot process much?

or is there an alternate method to speed up that part of booting?

[directhex]

UEFI, by default, will enumerate all your devices. It should do so much faster than BIOS did, because BIOS had to emulate a bunch of old-fashioned access methods which by spec must take several seconds of "settling" time (up to 30 seconds per controller for SCSI controllers, according to the spec).

OPTIONALLY, UEFI allows "fast boot", whereby it basically skips loading any drivers for anything except the default disk device - it won't load networking, USB, storage, etc, other than for the disk containing your EFI System Partition. In your case this would load MUCH faster. The big downside to fast boot is you can't enter firmware setup with a keypress anymore (because your USB driver is not loaded) - you need to enter it via clicking the appropriate option in Windows to reboot to UEFI config.

I have zero delay between the firmware logo screen and GRUB loading. There's some delay before the firmware logo.

[Unique]

thanks, that's a lot more helpful than what I could find googling

this "fast boot" sounds like what I want and would make a big difference. is this something that is set and not changeable from the initial windows install, or can you later chop and change back to the old method to let you access the BIOS the old way? the new way seems fine, it's just sometimes based on past experience you need to get into the BIOS immediately if you are having problems booting up etc

and I therefore presume "fast boot" just loads all the drivers when windows completes the boot sequence and everything works as normal from then onwards?

on my setup, as the MOBO doesn't have many sata ports I have a few PCI/PCI-e sata cards and during the boot process it's initialising those and the drives that takes most of the time

thanks again!