Strange loading/hard-drive problem

[Ihaveworms]

On my old computer (XP), I had a old ribbon cable hard-drive and a SATA drive that I used for storage. My OS was installed on the ribbon cable drive.

Whenever I would dissconnect the SATA drive, windows would load a lot faster but really didnt effect the actual performance once it was completely loaded. Even after formatting the ribbon cable drive and reinstalling windows it would still take a while to load with that SATA drive plugged in.

Now I have my new vista machine I built last week. I got a new 500gb sata drive and transfered my old 300gb sata drive to my new comp. I installed Vista on the new SATA drive and it would load fast and everything with the 300gb also plugged. Now today it has starting doing the same thing, taking a much longer time to boot Vista (like my XP machine) with that 300gb SATA drive attached. Is there a way to fix this?

 

[bbz_Ghost]

Vista is a self-tuning OS, which means it's basically looking after itself.

The more you reboot Vista, the more often it must refill the SuperPrefetch cache in RAM with all the data and most used application/program files that you commonly use. That means stop rebooting so much, seriously. Put the computer to "Sleep" or Standby as it's also known instead of shutting down. There is no legitimate reason to shut down a PC running Vista anymore; Standby consumes such a miniscule amount of power that it's nothing more than a few cents a month on a power bill and the computer is up and available to pick up where you stopped using it in seconds, not minutes.

It sounds to me like you're putting too much emphasis on the boot times; that's not what makes Vista what it is, that's just a small part of it. The need for Vista to constantly refill that SuperPrefetch cache becomes more of an issue the longer you use Vista because more application data and information will need to be placed into that cache each time you reboot - in the long run the effect of having so much cached data is a vastly more responsive machine overall.

SATA drives don't suffer from the same issues that ATA/IDE drives (what you refer to as "ribbon cable" drives) in the sense that each SATA cable is its own channel - there is never an issue with not being able to access multiple drives at the same time. ATA/IDE drives on the same "ribbon cable" can't access both at the same time; the operations happen with each drive individually and switches back and forth, giving the appearance of happening at the same time, but it's actually happening with a big hit to performance.

Vista gets a bit slower on the boot time for the first few weeks till it self-tunes, this typically takes 2-3 weeks of daily usage.

After that period, it'll be faster than XP is on the same hardware because of SuperPrefetch and some other newer technologies incorporated in Vista.

 

[Ihaveworms]

That doesn't really answer my question. I reboot becuase I am overclocking and doing other various tweaking. Also, it is a sign something is wrong if I am having the exact same issue as I was with my old XP machine as it is happening with my Vista machine when. It should not be taking so long to load and it doesn't make since that when I unplug it it boots a lot faster.