How does a HBA IT card affect boot order with on-board drives?

[6BQ5]

Hello!

I have an ASRock Z370 motherboard that boots up from a M.2 SSD drive and I would like to add a HBA IT card to expand my storage capacity with mechanical hard drives. Would the HBA IT card take priority over the M.2 drive clicked into my motherboard?

I am booting to Windows 11 and this is a consumer desktop system.

Thanks!

 

[uldise]

Would the HBA IT card take priority over the M.2 drive clicked into my motherboard?

you select boot device in BIOS settings..

 

[Sean Ho]

booting from a drive attached to the hba is done via the hba's option rom. In the hba's config you can disable booting from it, so its option rom won't present any drives to the uefi's boot device list.

 

[i386]

I think so far all answers are correct and that there is another point, the pcie "device" number/enumeration. When you add a new pcie device and start the system the bios/uefi will try to find all pcie devices starting the process at pcie device #0. It's possible that the number of your m.2 device changes which could affect the boot order (but bios/uefi is a little bit smarter and looks for boot code and puts it in the first place)