How fast should an SSD boot Windows?

[Tsavo]

My times, all W7 Home Premium, from cold boot:

My E3200 with WD 640GB Blue: 21s to pass BIOS, 38s to desktop, 1m 06s fully loaded.

Core i5 750 with Samsung F3 500GB: 2m12s from cold boot to fully loaded. Same PC with Intel 120GB SSD

17s to pass BIOS, 37s to desktop, 48s to fully loaded.

I used a WD Black 1TB in the Core i5 machine and it was 2m+ to boot, too.

 

[deimos3428]

May you show a video of your system booting up in 5 seconds from pushing the power button please ?

I'm pretty sure he's joking, but there are ways to speed up POST ever so slightly by turning off options in the BIOS. There are also ways to load an "instant-on" OS for surfing in about 5 seconds. (ASUS calls their version Express Gate; other motherboard vendors have similar offerings...)

But yeah, SSDs don't dramatically speed up booting. I had it down to about 30s, but lost a few seconds by moving to a very fast SSD RAID. Darn controller spends a few extra seconds scanning for disks!

 

[JAG87]

May you show a video of your system booting up in 5 seconds from pushing the power button please ?

I can show you a video of mine booting in less than two seconds. And by using the same trick you also have most stuff in your memory still, which makes an HDD almost as fast as an SSD system.

Who the hell cold boots nowadays..... D:

 

[Zap]

I can show you a video of mine booting in less than two seconds.

Yeah, S3 sleep.

My wife's current Core i5 rig (soon to be Sandy Bridge) does the same.

The sad thing is that my X58 rig still takes forever to wake from S3 sleep. A cold boot is well over a minute, and waking from S3 is around 15 seconds. :\

 

[Emulex]

x58 is a cool chipset though. i have two cpu's (xeon) so it can use ECC and if you don't have xeon's you can use non-ecc. really flexible chipset but you are right it is slower than others.

I think the caching of the hardware features help a ton since it won't check to see if anything has changed so it can streamline the boot process a ton. checking for floppy/boot cd/presence of drives really eats up time. raid kills it too since it may do a staged drive spin-up if you have many drives

 

[Rubycon]

I never understood this fascination with boot times. You are not productive if you are constantly booting your computer!

 

[Makaveli]

5 seconds lol

That's a nice dream.

With post its about 45 seconds on my machine.

Without Post about 15-20seconds.

And Rubycon is correct my machines goes into sleep mode more than I reboot it.

I only reboot for windows updates and or patches which may be once a month.

With windows 7 you shouldn't need to reboot on a regular basis its not windows 98.

 

[Zap]

I actually haven't been using S3 sleep that much on my X58 setup because I sometimes get an audio problem after resuming - one channel is dead until power cycle. Doesn't happen all the time, but enough times to be annoying.

 

[MrCoyote]

I got the Mushkin Callisto Deluxe 90GB SSD. Windows 7 64bit Ultimate installed in 10 minutes to the drive. Boot time with my Q6600 is BIOS 22sec, and then another 28sec to desktop. But that's because of some background stuff loading and with external RAID drives attached through PCI-e controllers causing slower bios boot time.

Once at the desktop, everything opens pretty much instantly to within a few seconds. This is where the SSD shines. No waiting on a clunky mechanical drive to load up anti-virus and all the other junk. It is pretty much instantly loaded by the time the desktop appears, making the whole system very responsive quickly.

 

[thescreensavers]

40 seconds with my Vostro 1700 powered by a T9300, with the boot GUI turned off and both processors turned on.

Depends on your systems POST, and bios tests. 5 seconds, never happen.

I also have the T9300, And as above I get 24 sec with the same settings. What chipset you got?

 

[thescreensavers]

I never understood this fascination with boot times. You are not productive if you are constantly booting your computer!

... But my machine is better then yours cause it boots faster!

 

[Rubycon]

... But my machine is better then yours cause it boots faster!

My smart host takes about 30 seconds from power on to fully loading the kernel. Windows boot takes about seven seconds to the domain validation (desktop screen). From there anything is available with little wait. (read instantly)

I have a quad core i7 notebook with 16GB RAM and a single X25-M 160GB HDD.It is by far a POS in comparison probably due to chipset limitations. It definitely boots to the logon screen faster though. :biggrin:

 

[Makaveli]

I actually haven't been using S3 sleep that much on my X58 setup because I sometimes get an audio problem after resuming - one channel is dead until power cycle. Doesn't happen all the time, but enough times to be annoying.

Is that with onboard audio ?

When I first got my rig build I ran into issues with S3 sleep aswell. Where sometimes the machine would just sleep itself before the actual time it was suppose to. Then it wouldn't wake up from sleep until a reboot.

A few bios updates later, windows updates, and some changes in the bios seemed to have resolved most issues. On the rare occasion I might have an issue with it, but it works well enough and I prefer it to shutting down my machine and restarting all the time.

 

[Makaveli]

My smart host takes about 30 seconds from power on to fully loading the kernel. Windows boot takes about seven seconds to the domain validation (desktop screen). From there anything is available with little wait. (read instantly)

I have a quad core i7 notebook with 16GB RAM and a single X25-M 160GB HDD.It is by far a POS in comparison probably due to chipset limitations. It definitely boots to the logon screen faster though. :biggrin:

laptop with 16GB's of RAM wow!

Is it by chance an HP?

 

[Rubycon]

Oh and regarding S3...

On EVGA boards it's completely borked. Forget about it! :thumbsdown:

laptop with 16GB's of RAM wow!

Is it by chance an HP?

Nope, Asus G73.

 

[thescreensavers]

^ The i7 most likely has the ICH10M, many laptops may gimp sata speeds. You can install Crystal Disk info, it can tell you what rate its connected at. But I am going to guess since your have such a high end laptop that it should be wide open

The SSD makes things that were quick quicker. you cant really show the speed of an SSD in windows without someone on an HDD doing it at the same time next to you ha.

 

[Rubycon]

The notebook was really slow at first (only getting 6.4 in WEI, for example!) but after the new storage drivers came out from Intel it's getting a 7.8 which is on par what those disks get on a desktop system, AHCI.

 

[Tsavo]

I never understood this fascination with boot times. You are not productive if you are constantly booting your computer!

Not everyone keeps their machines on all the time, or uses S3. And not everyone uses their PC's to be productive.

YOU try finding a stable OC with a PC that takes over two minutes to load W7 to a usable state and you'll recognize that fast boots aren't only fascinating, but necessary to retain one's sanity and to keep the PC from being thrown out the window.

2 min boots: :|

48s boots: :awe:

 

[HeXen]

i wonder if theres a way for them to use the GPU to syncronously load and execute stuff? like make Windows GPGPU?
Anyway, supposedly, W8 is shooting for a 10 second bootup time. whether that goal is for ssd or what is anyones guess.

i have the C300...at one point was the fastest SSD in the world. with all my stuff, it takes 24-33 seconds. 13-17 seconds by default and thats using recorded data, not me using a stopwatch or anything Plus all without using Superfetch. was recomended to turn that off when using ssd's.
So no, SSD's are not a super miracle, Windows sucks too bad to be a miracle in anything, but they are much better in general use than any mechanical drive. I even have a Velociraptor and theres a reason it now sits in a drawer somewhere.

I do use S3 on occasion, but half the time i end up having to reboot anyway cause either something wont load right or some other oddball occurance that can't be flushed out into working right without a reboot for some reason.

 

[Rubycon]

Not everyone keeps their machines on all the time, or uses S3. And not everyone uses their PC's to be productive.

YOU try finding a stable OC with a PC that takes over two minutes to load W7 to a usable state and you'll recognize that fast boots aren't only fascinating, but necessary to retain one's sanity and to keep the PC from being thrown out the window.

2 min boots: :|

48s boots: :awe:

Of course! That's why if I'm testing something that's crashing or requires the box to be rebooted frequently I switch to a single SSD on AHCI. Typically with just a plain vanilla 7 install it's about 20 seconds from power on to desktop.

 

[JAG87]

Oh and regarding S3...

On EVGA boards it's completely borked. Forget about it! :thumbsdown:



Nope, Asus G73.

I don't know Ruby, I'm using it and it works pretty damn good. I have no issues what so ever right now. The only couple of issues I had was Caviar Greens not waking up, but I moved those to the server now, and my USB mic not working after resume, but I isolated it to applications accessing DirectSound being left open.

Once you get to know your system, it works like a charm.

 

[Rubycon]

EVGA boards used: SR-2 (both A and B revisions), Classified 762 (4way), Classified 759. (original "limited" edition). The 762 is very fussy (read: unusable with my Areca ARC1880ix-24 controllers).

The last time I tried S3 on the 762 was a more simple configuration - just a single SSD on AHCI. It sleeps, the power light (using the front panel controller) changes to green but the fans stay running. It will wake normally.

On my Asus boards they do go to sleep - completely off just the power light flashing like a traffic light when it's out of service. Touching the mouse brings it back on. Of course with systems running RAID controllers there is a good 30 seconds before the locked desktop is visible. Kind of defeats the purpose of quick recovery!

I really don't mind S3 not working as the systems are running 24/7.

 

[hal2kilo]

I also have the T9300, And as above I get 24 sec with the same settings. What chipset you got?

Intel Mobile 965 Express (relatively slow FSB and memory)

 

[thescreensavers]

Intel Mobile 965 Express (relatively slow FSB and memory)

Thought so(since we have a Centrino compatible CPU), Now here is the harder part, Do you have the P, Q , or G model?

I have The P965.

The G and Q models do not have a dedicated video card attached, so if you have a GPU you most likely have the P.

On Other forums, Dell and Levono specifically had killed the Sata buss speed from II to I for battery saving reasons

Download "Crystal Disk Info" which will show you (THIS) Transfer mode is what you want to look at. As you see my 300gb drive is at "SATA/300"

Also I used Everest to show which chipset I have (Screen) CPUZ can also show this info

Also our CPU's are locked in to 800mhz FSB. I installed DDR2-800 ram but my bios limits it to 600

 

[hal2kilo]

Thought so(since we have a Centrino compatible CPU), Now here is the harder part, Do you have the P, Q , or G model?

I have The P965.

The G and Q models do not have a dedicated video card attached, so if you have a GPU you most likely have the G.

On Other forums, Dell and Levono specifically had killed the Sata buss speed from II to I for battery saving reasons

Download "Crystal Disk Info" which will show you (THIS) Transfer mode is what you want to look at. As you see my 300gb drive is at "SATA/300"

Also I used Everest to show which chipset I have (Screen) CPUZ can also show this info

Also our CPU's are locked in to 800mhz FSB. I installed DDR2-800 ram but my bios limits it to 600

Have the Invidia 8600 M graphics module, so I think it's probably a G also. Yea, thought about upgrading to faster memory, but discovered that 667 was the limit. I love my dual drive laptop but I wish it did have a faster chipset. I have Set FSB, but I can't seem to find out what the clock generator hardware is and have gotten hints that this Vostro is locked anyway. All in all though, not being a gamer, it does everything I want it to and I'm broadband bound at 7 meg on a good day anyway.

see my OP
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=31043653&postcount=1