Help! BIOS Changes Boot Drive

Hardware Hub Motherboards
1

Hi,

I'm having a little trouble with a custom file server I built and wondered if anyone has any bright ideas. 

Background Info:

Said file server is built from the hardware out of an old pc which consists of:

Asus P5Q Pro Turbo Motherboard, C2D 3.00Ghz, 4GB DDR2 RAM, 8x 3tb WD Green drives, 1x 256GB Samsung 840 SSD, 1x 4 port SATA PCI-E card, 8x hard drive power switches in front bays.

To save the HDD's life expentancy and power of the files that I infrequently access, I installed the power switches for the HDD's, so I could turn them on and off as needed. The SSD and 5 of the hard drives are plugged into the MOBO and the other 3 hard drives are plugged into the PCIE card. I've assigned all the drives a dedicated drive letter. 

Problem 1:

My first problem is that sometimes I reboot with 1+ HDD's powered up before POST and my PC tries to boot from one of the archive drives. I go into the BIOS and changed the primary device to the SSD. It boots, but if I then turn off/on any other drives, I will get the same error after restarting and one of the HDD's has moved into the primary position. To be clear, the SSD is always on and I want to boot from it every time, no exceptions.  

Problem 2:

The second problem is that while in windows I will have drive 'X' on and hit the power for drive 'Y'.  Drive 'Y' appears in windows explorer, but as a side effect, drive 'X' dissapears, even though the power is on for it. There does not seem to be any correlation between the drives that are plugged into the MOBO and the ones into the PCI-E card. It is not a power issue as I can turn all 8 drives on, reboot and have them all working fine. 

This was supposed to be an easy way for my family to access all the data we have, by pressing a button on the front of the case for the drive they wanted to access. I'm at the stage where I cam considering just taking out the CPU / RAM / MOBO and replacing it with a MOBO with 10x SATA ports natively (no idea if this will work though). Obviously I'd like to avoid the cost and hassle if possible, so any help appreciated. 

2

Use the power saving features in the OS. Windows, linux etc all have them. A HDD in sleep/low power mode consumes very little (check the specs, less than 1 Watt usually). Green drives consumes very little to begin with. A non-UEFI motherboard can't really be locked in on the boot drive, in theory but not maybe in practice, depends on the specific motherboard. Besides, every time you switch off a drive you need to make sure it is powered down. Are you sure the motherboard really support SATA hotplug? Etc. Get rid of the switches, are you sure those doesn't create voltage spikes/bounces? Do they have components (caps etc) in them to prevent that? Might kill your drives quite fast.

Spend your money on a better PSU, will save you a lot more money in the long run.

3

Thanks for the reply!

I think I will consider doing what you have recommended.

FYI, I have been using a program called "Hot Swap!" which lets me power down a drive, so I can safely disconnect it / press the power off button. The switches do have caps etc and look well made, however I have no idea about the voltage spikes etc, which as you rightly pointed out, is cause for concern. Fortunately I have a very good power supply in there anyway.

Again, thank you for your reply. You've helped me make up my mind :)

4

Glad I could help you :)

I've done similar things in the past, messing around with switching off HDDs and various non-enterprise hotswap solutions. In the end it was not really worth the hassle.