I was experiencing slow system boot: my system was stuck 10 - 15 seconds on the initial post procedure with a black screen and a small top left corner blinking white underscore.
I was noticing my external 10tb Seagate hard drive was starting rotate on initial system setup, and I had the suspect it was this device that was causing boot slowing down. and.. I was correct! I disconnected hard the drive and system boot up in ~~ 20 seconds.
It seems Bios waits until the external hard drive is ready, and this Seagate drive is particulary slow initializing and turning on it’s spinning plates.
I wanted to fix this annoying behaviour: my MSI motherboard does not allow particular configuration on this aspect, it’s pretty blinded system. So the only thing worked for me was disabling USB legacy directly on Bios, so motherboard does not try to detect USB bootable devices during post.
But this is bad because I even can’t be able to boot from an USB key.
I tried also to set the USB Legacy Bios value on “Auto”, but this did not help, system was continuing checking up the hard drive once turned on.
So in the end I resolved this situation attaching the hard drive on an high performance 4 ports USB 3.2 hub, with a switcher on / off on each USB port.
Now I decided to turn on legacy USB support on Bios, but every time I turn off my PC I also turn off the external USB hard drive switch.
When I tun on my PC I let the PC boot without detecting the hard drive and only when I’m on my OS I turn on the hub switch.
That’s the best compromise I found.
Sadly I discovered Ryzen motherboards are pretty sensible on USB devices detecting..
It’s no so dangerous btw, but it was so annoying waiting more 15 seconds each time I turn on the system, because I frequently boot up the machine with different kind of boot device.
@ricky89 Yeah, the USB hub with individual switches is honestly a pretty clever workaround, nice problem solving there.
One thing worth looking into if you haven’t already is whether your MSI board has a “Fast Boot” option separate from the USB Legacy setting. Some MSI boards bury it under the Boot or Settings tab and it can tell the BIOS to skip enumerating certain devices during POST. It’s not the same as disabling USB Legacy entirely so you’d still be able to boot from a USB stick if you needed to.
Another option is checking if there’s a newer BIOS update available for your board. MSI has occasionally fixed USB enumeration timing in firmware updates, especially on Ryzen platforms where like you said the USB controller behavior can be a bit quirky.
But honestly if neither of those pan out, the switched hub solution is totally reasonable. It’s one of those annoying hardware-level things.
Out of curiosity, which MSI board is it? Some of the older B450/B550 boards were particularly troublesome. Mine is a B550 Tomahawk.
soo thats whats been happening recently with my main pc i have a ryzen 9 on a msi board with two big external hard drives and just started doing it only when i had to update the BIOS because i went from and Older ryzen 5 to a ryzen 9 5950X.. @ricky89 but will definitely have to get the hub with a switch just in case @hydn idea doesnt work as i will be looking into this tomorrow for sure @hydn mines a B550 gaming plus and it only started to do this once i updated the BIOS which I had to so the motherboard would register the new CPU
@hydn I’m using last available MSI Bios, released in september 2025, sadly there’s not a Fast Boot option; of course I’ve selected the only drive with the OS as unique and main boot device, but still at every system startup the motherboard interrogates all USB devices…
I own a MSI X470 Gaming Plus, no problems after all, all settings are stable, Ryzen dynamic boost profile level 3 and Ram XMP 3200mhz are working flawless.. This behaviour is just a bit annoying.
@Itachixkurosaki I bought this one from amazon: Sabrent USB Switch, it’s giving the best performance, disks are very stable. Very suggested.