
Originally Posted by
watercooled
You could try booting without the extra drives attached, provided they're not essential for boot, to see if it helps at all.
If the extra time is spent on the BIOS splash screen then Windows will have no impact. A firmware update could have potentially caused the drive to take longer to initialise; check for newer firmware versions which may alleviate the problem. Also, simply adding extra drives could feasibly add time to POST.
Have you made any changes to BIOS settings? Enabling extra on-board devices may increase POST time, so disabling things like floppy/IDE/1394/serial/parallel/etc controllers could shave off a few seconds if you don't need them.
Also, are you using the drive in AHCI mode, and is TRIM enabled? Don't just go and change this in BIOS as Windows will fail to boot unless you make a few changes to the registry first.