How fast should an SSD boot Windows?

[fuzzymath10]

My laptop (D630 and has 965 with IGP) boots faster than my desktop by some margin. Its bios is very quick so from pushing power button I count about 20s. Also probably because laptops may not have as much stuff to initialize, which can take painfully long.

 

[DominionSeraph]

Welcome to 2002.

Single-core Northwood Celeron 2.4GHz. (128K L2 cache) 133MHz DDR.

 

[thescreensavers]

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

Slight typo in what I wrote

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.

Can you confirm with CPU-Z? In the mainboard tab

Yea none of the Software CPU overclockers work, I tried my self. I did manage to gain 400 points in 3Dmark06 with a GPU Over clocker, it helped me play crysis a bit better, gained a bit so from high teens in really going on stuff, to low 20s.

Is your BIOS by Insyde?

My laptop (D630 and has 965 with IGP) boots faster than my desktop by some margin. Its bios is very quick so from pushing power button I count about 20s. Also probably because laptops may not have as much stuff to initialize, which can take painfully long.

I believe one of the people complaining was with the D630, are your drives in Sata II mode?

 

[Brunnis]

It takes roughly 9 seconds for my X25-M G2 80GB from the point when Windows 7 starts loading until I reach the login screen. From there to a usable desktop, it takes another 2 seconds or so.

I'd say that the Windows loading time is upwards twice as fast as a mechanical drive. However, due to the BIOS taking a good long while to complete its tasks, complete boot times won't improve nearly as much.

 

[Zap]

Is that with onboard audio ?

Yes it is.

I'll just live with it for now. Too many other things on my plate, like upgrading my wife's rig, building a gaming rig for someone I know, upgrading my HTPC so someone else can buy the mobo/proc, driving across the country to deliver a car, visiting family, finding a job, grabbing lunch with a friend today... not necessarily in that order. :\

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!

Ahhh, maybe that's why my Asus P6T takes forever to wake from S3? Even though I'm not actually running RAID at this moment, RAID is enabled in BIOS. Also, I have six drives (1x SSD, 3x HDD, 2x ODD).

 

[HeXen]

most of the Asus boards i had never did sleep well. some not at all or would wake during the night on its own. my last one would just blank the screen then go back to desktop, latest bios. my current MSI sleeps just as it should.

 

[Doggiedog]

I just timed my boot up and the bios was 15 seconds. The Win 7 startup time was 1 minute for a total time of 1:15. That seems very slow to me. I just tweaked everything too.

 

[jjmIII]

Mine was trying to boot before I installed it!

 

[DominionSeraph]

I just timed my boot up and the bios was 15 seconds. The Win 7 startup time was 1 minute for a total time of 1:15. That seems very slow to me. I just tweaked everything too.

Considering that Win7 is supposed to be faster than Vista, and Vista'll boot in under a minute off an old 150GB Raptor with an X2 5200+, I'd say that's slow.

What SSD and processor?

 

[thescreensavers]

I just timed my boot up and the bios was 15 seconds. The Win 7 startup time was 1 minute for a total time of 1:15. That seems very slow to me. I just tweaked everything too.

Is your SSD running in IDE mode? How about SATA I mode?

 

[Castiel]

13 seconds for mine

 

[Doggiedog]

Considering that Win7 is supposed to be faster than Vista, and Vista'll boot in under a minute off an old 150GB Raptor with an X2 5200+, I'd say that's slow.

What SSD and processor?

Corsair F120, SB 2600K @4.4Ghz, Asus P8P67 Deluxe HD5870

I went to the OCZ tech forum and did all of the tweaks recommended there. I turned off indexing, enabled TRIM, etc. I do have 4 other HDDs in the rig. 2x1.5TB RAID and 2x 1TB SATA and a SATA DVD-R. The SSD sits on its own SATA 6 port on AHCI. There's nothing else on the other SATA 6 port.

Edit: And one last thing. I ran the WEI and my drive rating went down. It used to be 7.8 and went to 7.7. Strangely my CPU went from 7.7 to 7.8.

 

[jiffylube1024]

Considering that Win7 is supposed to be faster than Vista, and Vista'll boot in under a minute off an old 150GB Raptor with an X2 5200+, I'd say that's slow.

What SSD and processor?

It all depends on how many programs you have installed that need to load when you boot, etc.
------------

So many people consider boot time the time from button press until the Windows desktop loads, but, having tested boot times extensively on laptops and desktops using SSD's, HDD's and Momentus XT's, there's a bit more to it than that.

Many people don't count the time it takes for all programs to load, such as the Gadget bar and all programs in the clock tray. On HDD's, loading everything in the startup folder can take anywhere from a few seconds (fresh Windows install) to 30 seconds to over a minute (a typical hard drive with lots of programs installed).

Most SSD's will load all of these startup programs in 5-10 seconds because of their awesome random read speed. Similarly, a Momentus XT hybrid hard drive more than cuts these startup program load times in half.

----------

When I first got my first SSD, I was also underwhelmed with the boot times when you compare button press to Windows screen times. But this is because things like BIOS screen loads don't change, and because when Windows shows up, it's not the end of loading.

 

[taltamir]

So many people consider boot time the time from button press until the Windows desktop loads, but, having tested boot times extensively on laptops and desktops using SSD's, HDD's and Momentus XT's, there's a bit more to it than that.

If you measure the time from the "button press" then the HDD/SSD speed only matters during a small portion of your entire boot process. A good portion of it is the BIOS booting up (Its not just POST).

Google has been working on firmware aspects of laptops to make them do that part much, much faster for its upcoming chromeOS.

 

[Makaveli]

This is true alot of people post boot time without making a clear indication if that is with post or not.

The Bios add quite abit of time to the boot process. On average with ssd's you are looking at 15-20sec boots without post but all boards are different.

 

[Doggiedog]

I don't have much loading as my system is brand new. I did add 4 gadgets (weather, traffic, calendar and moon phase). I'll need to look into this some more. I ran some tests and I was getting 250Mbps on the SSD, 203Mbps on RAID and 105Mbps for my other SATA drives.

 

[Emulex]

OSX compresses the hiberfil while windows doesn't. But really why not just hibernate? is there really a need to reboot? with citrix/vmware/etc - desktop virtualization will not need a reboot much. Linux even has the ability (not all cases) to upgrade the kernel without a reboot or modules.

Compared to a hard drive - ssd makes life awesome! i used to spend so much time staring at the hard drive light. no more!!

 

[hal2kilo]

It all depends on how many programs you have installed that need to load when you boot, etc.
------------

So many people consider boot time the time from button press until the Windows desktop loads, but, having tested boot times extensively on laptops and desktops using SSD's, HDD's and Momentus XT's, there's a bit more to it than that.

Many people don't count the time it takes for all programs to load, such as the Gadget bar and all programs in the clock tray. On HDD's, loading everything in the startup folder can take anywhere from a few seconds (fresh Windows install) to 30 seconds to over a minute (a typical hard drive with lots of programs installed).

Most SSD's will load all of these startup programs in 5-10 seconds because of their awesome random read speed. Similarly, a Momentus XT hybrid hard drive more than cuts these startup program load times in half.

----------

When I first got my first SSD, I was also underwhelmed with the boot times when you compare button press to Windows screen times. But this is because things like BIOS screen loads don't change, and because when Windows shows up, it's not the end of loading.

Yea, when I say my Vostro's boot takes 40 seconds that's with all the programs loaded and the HD led indications quite.

 

[strep3241]

On my system, from the time I hit the power button and fully usable, it takes about 1 minute. What kind of improvement would I see with an SSD?

 

[Emulex]

huge performance gains dude. i have the x58 chipset with two nehalem cpu's and its night and day. once you go ssd you will never be able to use hard drive again.

went from a single 640gb to a single ssd and boot times are 10x faster, i can use CS5 photoshop for image preview (even with measly 6gb of ram) and its so damn fast what took 10 seconds to load before takes 2 seconds (with no ram caching).

now if you raid two ssd's you get even more performance. no shock issues, less noise, more power consumption (odd, but i see this), and i can put the ssd to sleep instantly without the spin-up time penalty of hard drive.

full a/v scans take 14 minutes instead of 1.5 hours; backups take 30 minutes over network instead of 1.5 hours (full daily compressed images). updates are far faster.

I can schedule an AV scan and Backup at the same time and have the machine done in 30 minutes and back to sleep where as before my policy (daily full av scans and daily full image backups) would run sequentially and take hours. this converts to energy spent.

IMO you are seriously crippling your setup by using hard drives for the core o/s drive. Keep the hard drives for mass storage.

you can get a cheap 64gb (55 usable) sandforce for $98 (amazon s599/microcenter g2) and give it a shot - if you don't like what you see - return it.

But with a fresh windows 7 install (or osx or *nix) you will see mad gains in usability all over the place.

It is by far the best bang for buck mod these days. Well than and the 3x4gb for $129 (fry's) - that would help alot too going to 12gb. but then you have ginourmous hibernation file and iirc windows doesn't compress that file like the mac's.

Just do it! then let us know what you think

 

[poohbear]

after the bios screen (i.e. once i see the Windows logo) it takes about 10-13sec. just fyi the BIOS has nothing to do w/ the SSD, its the mobo running that.

 

[HeXen]

i use event logs. plenty of apps that will show easily what the actual Windows boot time is. Stardock's tweak7 is the easiest and fastest to read and includes complete history and how long each part takes. You then have to average it cuase its never the same time each bootup.

the bios boot time is irrelevant to the OS or hardware performance.