Benefits to EFI boot/GPT drives?

[wpcoe]

I finally managed to install/configure an EFI boot for Windows 8.

As I understood it the benefits of using such an arrangement are:

(1) able to use large drives
(2) faster boot time
(3) able to secure boot

Since apparently my UEFI motherboard does not support secure boot, that eliminates one of my main reasons for being interested in EFI boot.

Win8 boot to a GPT drive does not seem any faster than my previous Win7 boot to a MBR drive. BootRacer shows my Win8 EFI boot ranges from 27 to 33 seconds (total time to desktop), which IIRC is about the same as before. So, that strikes another reason.

I don't see myself using anything much bigger than 1TB or 2TB drives for the forseeable future.

Am I overlooking any good reason to use an EFI-booted GPT system?

I was surprised to see that GPT formatting eats up over 500MB of space, which is premium space on an SSD:

 

[ShintaiDK]

I dont see how it will make boot time faster. More secure is also doubtful. If anything, its is less secure to boot with UEFI due to the rootkit issue.

The main benefit of GPT is the ability to use a boot drive above 2TB.

 

[wpcoe]

Here's a Microsoft explanation of Secure Boot: "Protecting the pre-OS environment with UEFI"

As far as quicker booting, I've read reports of 10-second boots. If it's on the internet, it has to be true, right? :whiste:

(One random example of a "ten second boot")

 

[ShintaiDK]

Our T420 boots in 8 without

The big issue with UEFI is that you can place rootkits undetectable for the OS in the preload.

 

[lamedude]

GPT can do more than 4 partitions.

 

[wpcoe]

So, the potential benefits of a EFI boot and a GPT drive are:

(1) able to use large drives
(2) faster boot time*
(3) Secure Boot
(4) >4 partitions

and, for my system and use:

(1) don't forsee using >2TB drives
(2) boot time is comparable on GPT to MBR*
(3) per Win8 System Information: "Secure Boot State ... Unsupported," and
(4) don't forsee needing more than four primary partitions, so

it looks like I might as well revert to MBR, just so I don't have to mess around with the data on my hard drive to make it GPT.

*I don't think that the bragged-about faster boot time is GPT dependent. I think that the idea is that a UEFI motherboard can get to the OS loader faster than a traditional BIOS POST and whether the drive is GPT or MBR doesn't affect the actual OS load time significantly, if at all?

 

[wpcoe]

Our T420 boots in 8 without

It does a cold boot to a usable Windows desktop in eight seconds?

 

[ShintaiDK]

It does a cold boot to a usable Windows desktop in eight seconds?

Yep. The main key is naturally SSD and quick BIOS.

 

[wpcoe]

Hey, I'm really jealous! A cold boot to a usable Windows desktop in eight seconds versus my:

I reinstalled Win8 to a MBR formatted Intel 520 SSD, but haven't finished tweaking the system, like delaying service starts for things that don't need to be started immediately upon boot.

With the timer on my iPhone I unscientifically timed from pressing the power button, and it took about 13 seconds to first display the Win8 logo. Stopping the timer when BootRacer also stopped, showed an elapsed time of 59.2 seconds vs BootTimer's reported 30.921 seconds.

(Not sure what BootTimer uses to determine that Windows has finished booting, though. It continues timing well after my antivrus and firewall icons have loaded and I can actually connect to the internet.)

Regardless, while your T420 has booted to a useable desktop, my desktop is still in UEFI booting prior to handing over to the Windows loader!

 

[ShintaiDK]

Its very different. We got 4 PCs here in the house. All with somewhat very different boot times. The slowest is our HTPC with an i5 661 on a DH57JG board with SSD for OS. However its not due to the board, BIOS or CPU. Windows just decides to wait an extra 30 seconds. So its maybe 40-45 seconds to boot.

 

[bankster55]

The biggest dif in boot times will be using a RAID 0 SSD setup with the O/S, especially with latest drives - Neutron, Samsung 840 Pro OCZ V4

Greatest benefit to me using GPT is RAID metadata at beginning and end of drive, much easier to recover RAID wrecks
Also:
128 primaries (no logicals no extended)
MFT CRC checking
7.4 Zettabytes addressing (X64)
15 exabyte max partitions

I dont make any more AHCI, only RAID - you can run single drive in RAID mode and it runs as AHCI, unless you create a volume with it
I dont make any more MSDOS MBR only GPT even my RAIDED 256 GB SSD's
Drives today are 512B sectors emulated to 4096B, but the 4096 native drives are coming which can only be GPT. And Win 8 is geared to UEFI not MBR.
Intel is only keeping MBR around for XP, otherwise it would be GONE.

Question of the week:
A HDD can have 26 letters
for partitions
A and B are taken
C is for O/S
D is for DVD
That leaves 22 letters avail for partitions
What happens when you make 30 primaries - lol

 

[ShintaiDK]

Question of the week:
A HDD can have 26 letters
for partitions
A and B are taken
C is for O/S
D is for DVD
That leaves 22 letters avail for partitions
What happens when you make 30 primaries - lol

Just type mountvol. Should be selfexplaining

 

[wpcoe]

For the forseeable future, for my use on my system, the only benefit for GPT I see would be >4 partitions. Ironically, my MBR 1TB drive has >4 partitions (a couple in an extended partition), but my 2nd SSD with only one partition is GPT.

At the time I reinstalled Windows for a non-EFI boot to be able to use my 1TB hard drive, I didn't realize non-EFI windows would read GPT, or I would have left my primary SSD (boot partition and data partition) as GPT. I'm not about to change it from MBR to GPT (again) and re-install Win8 yet another time, though.

 

[Charles Kozierok]

People still care about boot time?

With sleep and hibernation, I must boot my machine maybe a handful of times a month. I guess if you're constantly tinkering with your hardware and software, you'd reboot more often, but...

 

[jkauff]

People still care about boot time?

With sleep and hibernation, I must boot my machine maybe a handful of times a month. I guess if you're constantly tinkering with your hardware and software, you'd reboot more often, but...

Until software updates that require a reboot and 3rd party OS services that don't play well with Hibernate go away, I'll continue to be concerned about boot times.

 

[Marco Sulla]

UEFI does improve boot performance. This is because the device can use ACPI directly from UEFI:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface#Advantages
see note 13 in particular. This is reported also by Microsoft:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn336946.aspx
Furthermore you can boot over internet directly from UEFI. This was a little more complicated with BIOS.

To sum up, advantages:

1. support hd of more than 2 TB
2. faster boot and shutdown
3. easy boot over internet
4. more flexible in general

But it has also big disadvantages:

1. Compatibility: gparted seems to be the only partition tool that can manage GPT tables, and not fully. Furthermore UEFI seems to be not compatible with a lot of boot CDs. For example, Gparted live CD GUI is not displayed at boot. This is probably hardware and UEFI OS dependant.
2. Usability: Secure Boot is a mess. A relly mess. It does prevent you to boot from CD any rescue utilities and to install any another OS, like Linux.
3. Security: UEFi can prevent OS to use certain I/O operations. So if UEFI will be infected by a virus, this could be worse than an infected BIOS, I guess: https://archive.fosdem.org/2007/interview/ronald+g+minnich
4. False hd size advantage: beware of hard drive with more than 1 TB capacity. The more the capacity, the more the failure rate. Hitachi Deskstar line is a good exception. Read here for example: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

To sum up, the only real advantage of UEFI is the power on/off speedup, if supported by the hardware and UEFI software installed. This is not enough for me. I switched from UEFI+GPT to LEGACY+MBR on my Lenovo B590 laptop, and it seems a little more slow to start up and shut down, but not so much.

Conclusion: IMHO it's not a mature technology and I can live without for now. But if you have purchased a system with Windows 8 on UEFI, you'll use Windows 8 only and you're not going to repair your system by yourself if it will be fubar, I suppose you can leave it there.

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