SSD Boot times on the M15x

Right, this week Ive finally jumped on the SSD bandwagen and brought myself a 240GB Sandisk Extreme SSD. Ive installed Windows 7 from scratch (good old fashioned DVD) then installed the necessary drivers / utilites.

I am just a little dissapointed with the boot times. It is much faster than my old mechanical HDD (definatly used to go make a cup of tea whilst that booted), but it just seems to take too much time to boot past the POST / BIOS screen.

I timed the boot yesterday and it was 40 seconds to get to desktop (not including wiating for the wireless network to establish). Half of this time is waiting for the BIOS (Alienware logo) to appear! There is no 'quick boot' option in the BIOS, so is this normal? Is this something that I just have to live with (lol, its not the end of the world!! ), or is there something I should be checking / doing?

PS, Incidently, I am only getting 250mb read / write speeds (when the stated maximum read / write speed are 500mb+). I am assuming that this is because we only have SATA 3GB?

 

That's correct you have a sata2 3gbps interface. Your boot time is about average so don't worry.

 

Ok, thanks for that. Just listening to people 'boast' that they boot their machines boot in less than 20 seconds!

 

You can disable the GUI interface for windows in the msconfig menu. That diables the windows logo and cuts a few sec off boot time. Also disale any startup programs you don't need upon start up like Adobe or iTunes

 

I think the two people that have replied have not read your post properly.

There is no way the BIOS screen should take 20 seconds to complete. You have a problem, but it's probably easily sorted. My BIOS screen completes and progresses to Windows loading within about 5 seconds.

What BIOS version are you running? A09 is the latest, it may be a good idea to either update it, or if you are on A09 already then reset all settings to default.

Report back with progress.

 

Depends on your SATA operation, my R2 POSTs REALLY slow on RAID/IDE mode, AHCI was instant. When my R2 had 1 x 120 GB SSD for the OS, I got a usable desktop in about 15-16 seconds (not counting POST).

 

my m15x is set to AHCI with windows GUI disabled gets to windows in 30 seconds and wireless internet connect @ about 38 seconds. fyi

 

Im on A08, will update the BIOS today to A09 and report back. AHCI is already set.

 

Ok, A09 is now installed, it may have shaved 1-2 seconds of my boot time.

Oh well, its not the end of the world, just surprised that there is not a 'fast boot' option in the BIOS (to limit some of the Power On Self Tests when booting).

 

36 sec for me from pressing the ON button to using internet. Nothing disabled on the GUI side of things.

About 12 secs of this is POST. Takes quite a while on the M15x. When I say POST I mean from when pressing ON to the windows logo appearing. This time period is always constant so I can't believe the earlier comment about his doing it in 5 secs...

 

20 sec for the Alien's head to appear? Mine just got 5 sec and 30 sec for booting windows (log on already).

 

Download Boot Timer so you're not dealing with guesswork and timing variations. Download Boot Timer. Here's an example from my M15x with an old Intel X-25M 160GB, one of the earliest consumer SSD's. The M15x was not tricked out to minimize boot times, but startup programs were limited to those few that were actually needed. You should see the same sort of times with minimal cleanup.

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POST and Login Screen is really take a while indeed, not to mention this including me typing password to login ;p , here's my timing with G3 320 Intel :



mean from actual login screen until usable desktop, it only takes 5 seconds... not bad actually compared to normal HDD

 

Try disabling "Legacy USB device". This is only useful for making USB device like keyboard and mouse visible to OS that don't support USB such as NT4.0. By disabling legacy USB support, the motherboard doesn't spend time pooling USB devices. That shaved at least 3 seconds on my setup.

NOTE: On my motherboard (ASRock Z68 Extrem4 GEN3), completely disabling legacy USB prevented me from accessing the BIOS with my USB keyboard. I had to hook a PS/2 keyboard to regain access. I then noted that my USB mouse wasn't working in the EFUI BIOS either. With the PS/2 keyboard, I then selected "disable legacy USB, expect for EUFI BIOS" instead. Same speed improvement and I can now use both the USB keyboard to get into the BIOS and the USB mouse.

Other advise:
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1-Disable everything you are not using in the BIOS: Serial, parallel, floppy, firewire, Infrared, SATA / IDE controller etc...

2- Update motherboard BIOS and SSD, HD, DVD, Blu-Ray firmware

3- Update OS and device drivers

4- Buy a cheap PCI express SATA 3 controller. Hooking an expensive and mind boggling fast 256GB SSD to a SATA 2 controller is blaspheme

5- For those who use an on-board Intel SATA 3 controller, install the Intel AHCI driver (Intel calls it "Intel rapid storage") instead of using the Microsoft MSACHI that is installed by default with the OS. Better performance, less CPU overheard. Not much improvement, but improvement nevertheless... Note that current Intel ACHI driver (Intel rapid storage version 10.8.0.1003) doesn't support TRIM in RAID. The next version due to come out soon will.

6- Make sure your SSD is properly aligned. For that, use the app called "AS SSD benchmark". On the top left conner of this app, you get the SSD model number, just underneath its firmware version, then the driver type (Intel AHCI, Microsoft MSAHCI or whatever controller you are using. Must be green with the mention "OK") and then underneath still, you get the alignment starting track (must be green with the mention "OK"). This number is different for a SSD than a conventional hard disk and must be dividable by 4096. If this line is in red, the SSD drive is not properly aligned and performance will be sub-optimal. Use the partition tool of your choice to re-align properly.

7- Use a RAM disk to store your OS and browser temp file (moving the swap file to RAM disk is not recommended). That improve speed yet another notch and spare the SSD many small write operation helping slowing down SSD flash RAM degradation. Some app such as photoshop can see 5X speed improvement. I use ASRrock XfastRAM RAM disk with a 1.5Gb partition. This app interface include an automatic OS and browser (IE and Firefox) temp file redirection to RAM disk option. For those who don't have an ASRock motherboard, I recommend the free DataRam Ramdisk. You will have to manually redirect OS and browser temporary file location. I also redirected temporary file location for many other app such as archival program (7-zip, winrar etc...).

8- Do a disk clean-up (right click your C drive and select "option"). Do the regular cleanup in "disk cleanup" tab and then select the "more option"' tab. Then click "clean up" in the "system Restore and Shadow copies" section. Create a new restore point after that. The reason of doing this beside the obvious space you reclaim is to deleted any small log file and especially memory dump that make boot time longer. After multiple blue screen crash and associated memory dump (overclocking session) I noticed my system boot was way longer that it used to be. Cleaning up the C drive did the trick.

9- Use a registry cleaner app. I recommend CCleaner. Use the default configuration and you'll never have a problem. Not only it cleans the registry, it also clean stuff from the C drive the windows cleaner don't.

10-Uninstall any app or game you don't use. The more app and game installed, the longer the boot time.

11- Make sure TRIM and garbage collection are enabled. Make sure superfectch and C:\ auto defrag are disabled.
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My boot time: 22.2 sec from power on from cold start to login screen. That's 11.5 sec from LCD monitor detection and 5.9 sec from the Windows boot logo. You could add another 3 seconds after logon to 100% OS load completion and CPU idle, but the system responsiveness is pretty much instantaneous immediately after logon anyway, despite OS loading still in progress for another couple of seconds. Note that Asrock is renowned for its uber fast BIOS post process and that I don't have a dedicated video card BIOS to detect in my setup.

SSD Benchmark:

AS SSD-------------READ--------WRITE
V 1.6.4237

SEQ----------------493MB/s------191MB/s
4K------------------24MB/s-------76MB/s
4K-64--------------268MB/s------157MB/s
Acc----------------- 0.123ms-----0.202ms
Score: 763

CrystalDiskMark----READ------WRITE
V 3.01
500Mb, 1 pass

SEQ----------------501MB/s----188MB/s
512K---------------391MB/s----186MB/s
4K------------------26MB/s------83MB/s
4K-QD32-----------246MB/s----161MB/s

Anvil Storage utility-----READ------WRITE
V 1.0.44 RC1
1GB test file

Seq 4MB-----------------493MB/s----172MB/s
4K-------------------------24MB/s-----86MB/s
4KQD4--------------------95MB/s-----171MB/s
4KQD16------------------229MB/s----173MB/s
32K-----------------------125MB/s
128K----------------------286MB/s
Score---------------------1 823.72-----1 552.58----TOTAL: 3 376.30


My spec:

Case: Corsair Carbide 500R
Power: Seasonic X560 Gold
MB: ASRock Z68 Extrem4 GEN3 BIOS 1.20
CPU: i5-2500K @ 4.7Ghz
Video: Intel HD3000 @ 1.7Ghz (GTX670 soon)
RAM: Gskill 8GB @ 1866Mhz 10-9-9-28 1T 1.52V
SSD: Crucial M4 128GB Firmware 0309 (second SDD in RAID strip as soon as Intel driver support TRIM)
HD: Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB
DVD: LG GH24LS870
Blu-Ray: LG BH12LS38
OS: Windows 7 ultimate SP1 64 fully patched, all driver and firmware updated

 

Thanks for the detailed response Ramon, but not much us M15x (laptop) owners can do in response to the SATA2 connection, we are stuck with that!

Looking into the Intel AHCI driver and will see if it makes any difference. Will aslo check the USB legacy option in my BIOS settings.

Boz

 

25.038 in Boot Timer

Regular reg cleanups here with ccleaner - other than that haven't disabled anything on startup(apart from skype ofc)

 

I have 24.6 secs with quite a few startup programs and no registry cleaner used, thats with a 240gb hyperx 3k ssd

 

21.2 seconds recorded. Using a Crucial m4 256gb ssd.