Connected Thundertbolt drive causing very, very, very long boot times. Help!

Braintrust,

I have been able to determine that my two Glyph Technologies Thunderbolt 32TB RAIDs are causing very, very, long reboot/boot up times...longest timed at 10 minutes. When disconnected (and with USB 3 drives connected), the G9 Workstation boots as quickly as expected. But, when re-connecting the Thunderbolt RAIDs, the process is excruciatingly long (I am crazy long, as mentioned, sometimes up to 10 minutes).

I have mucked around in the BIOS settings, to include turning of DCA protections/security settings (Thunderbolt), but no luck. The best I can tell, I have removed most of the HP bloatware (e.g., Sure Start/Wolf/etc).

My system is a relatively new HP HP Z2 Mini G9 Workstation Desktop/i9-13900k/64GB RAM

Any suggestions?

Thanks.

Best,
Craig

Can other USB-C drives be plugged into that port when you boot? There may be a hardware issue, slow boot times when certain drives are present usually indicates a drive issue.

BobOmb said:

Can other USB-C drives be plugged into that port when you boot? There may be a hardware issue, slow boot times when certain drives are present usually indicates a drive issue.

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Thanks for the suggestion. I first connected a 4TB OWC USB-C drive into the same port and successfully rebooted without delay. I next tried a 4TB Thunderbolt 3 OWC SSD and it too did not cause a delay when rebooting. Strange. The hardware RAIDs (two 32TB RAIDs daisy changed) are functioning just fine and everything works as expected once booted and logged into Windows - no known performance issues.

I can't for the life of me figure out what is going and causing the boot delays.

Craig_B said:

Thanks for the suggestion. I first connected a 4TB OWC USB-C drive into the same port and successfully rebooted without delay. I next tried a 4TB Thunderbolt 3 OWC SSD and it too did not cause a delay when rebooting. Strange. The hardware RAIDs (two 32TB RAIDs daisy changed) are functioning just fine and everything works as expected once booted and logged into Windows - no known performance issues.

I can't for the life of me figure out what is going and causing the boot delays.

Click to expand...

It could be any number of things. Sometimes CHKDSK or even a VS can delay a boot time. If your RAID involves mirroring this to can slow things down a bit. Evidently you're using an external device and these often come with built in software that can temporarily slow down performance. Just keep an eye on it and see if you don't eventually bounce back to your regular speeds. I've seen this happen before.

I ran the system for a few days without the Thunderbolt 3 RAIDs connected and tested reboot times and they were as expected. Once the RAIDs were reconnected, ungodly reboot times returned. Next call will be to the Glymp Technologies tech support to see if they can be of any help as they were clueless via email and said such behavior was unusual and suggested a troubleshooting call.

As a test, I connected one of the Glyph Tech RAIDs to my HP ZBook running Windows 10 and while there was a noticeable delay with boot times, it was only slight and no where near what I am seeing with the Z2 Mini G9 Workstation running Windows 11.

Spoke to HP tech support and they are at a loss. They are sending a replacement flex port Thunderbolt card and I will see what happens after replacing.

Any other thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I really shouldn't take 5-10 minutes to get to the login screen with this thing connected.

Thanks.

Does it do the same after a restart from normal windows into Safe Mode? Set it from msconfig Boot zone.

weaselciuy01 said:

Does it do the same after a restart from normal windows into Safe Mode? Set it from msconfig Boot zone.

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Thanks for the suggestion. No change when booting into Safe Mode - tested this AM and it took 5 minutes to get to the login screen.

Craig_B said:

Thanks for the suggestion. No change when booting into Safe Mode - tested this AM and it took 5 minutes to get to the login screen.

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that`s disappointing. Points more to hardware issue.
I take it you have intel VMD Drivers already installed and working, from bios too.

Is the long wait time before windows starts loading up or during the time windows starts up?
Are drives(raid) encrypted? Or is the swap space encrypted?