UEFI vs Legacy Mode

Installed a new SSD drive in the S13 and realised I could not get anything installed in it unless I choose Legacy mode.

I'm wondering, when do you use UEFI? Is there a way to force drives smaller than 2TB to run on UEFI?

Just curious.

 

Out of curiosity, do you get sata II speeds or sata III speeds when installing with legacy instead of EFI? You can see the speed of the drive in windows in the intel storage manager.

 

SATA II unfortunately.

 

I replaced my HDD with 256GB Samsung 830 SSD and installed everything in UEFI mode.
Everything runs fine and boots as a breeeeeze.

Regarding Legacy/UEFI:
If I'm correct, there is no difference in speed.
However I'm being told (and read) that some quick-power up (from standby) have better support because it can use the newer 'BIOS' interface (=UEFI) instead sticking to the old tight fashioned BIOS.

By the way:
I installed Windows from my bootable (UEFI) USB stick of 4GB.
There are plenty of how-to's floating around.
Regarding SATA-2/3: It is mentioned earlier, but it seems that a clean boot-up/restart results into SATA-2. However... when going into sleep and resuming, many have seen that the driver is then initialized using SATA-3. So it seems to be a driver issue (or funny action by Sony). I haven't checked myself yet. There is some dedicated thread about this.

 

Did more reading, apparently it's because the SSD I used had an existing partition (used it to transfer some files before I inserted for install). I'll try again tonite by cleaning it out and reinstalling.

 

I am using Legacy Mode and rapid wake is still working.

 

True (I didn't say it wasn't working).
But I've read somewhere that the UEFI offers a better and broader interface to the hardware so some features are than possible working better/snappier/more features. Especially around the power management.
But again... these are not my experiences... I just read it somewhere.

BTW:
Apart from above:
With UEFI BIOS, the manufacturer does now have the possibility to provide a full-blown graphical setup environment. But I prefer the old fashioned textual BIOS settings... I think this is much more appropriate / readable for system settings stuff. And while my Sony S13 does have UEFI BIOS, it is still nicely textual

 

Newbie question. What are UEFI/Legacy modes and how to switch between them?

 

In order to install OS in UEFI mode, you have to have a boot device (say, USB stick) which contains UEFI bootloader.

Here is a quick guide for Windows 7: Installing Windows 7 in native EFI mode from USB - bit-tech.net Forums

After you ensure that your boot device has /efi/boot/bootx64.efi file, installation should work without a problem, and any partition size should work (it does not matter at all, actually).

As for the questions about UEFI in general - basically, UEFI is a replacement for BIOS. Without going into technical details, the most important difference is that UEFI is 64-bit, while BIOS works in 16-bit real mode. This adds certain amount of latency in the boot process (and resume from sleep) because your 64-bit processor will simulate 286 CPU from the power on all the way until your OS starts booting, only then your OS will switch it in 64-bit mode.

As you can see, this is a pure waste - however, it took 10 years for UEFI to became remotely popuar in the desktop market, as BIOS kind of "kept up" with all kinds of patches and workarounds to support modern hardware. PC OEMs were reluctant to turn UEFI ON (and they still are, actually) because desktop Windows versions before Vista SP1 did not support UEFI - and this is only for 64-bit. For 32-bit, it took until Windows 7 until UEFI became fully supported in 32-bit Windows.

Sony, in all its corporate stupidity even disabled UEFI on VPC-Z1 (as people were using UEFI "loophole" to patch the BIOS of VGN-Z to support virtualiztion). They finally backed off with the latest Z (Ivy Bridge SVZ) and re-enabled UEFI boot.

So, SVZ owners have no reason not to use UEFI - as nowdays, both Windows and Linux support UEFI.

 

trucrypt doesn't support gtp ;(

 

is there a point to reinstall windows if I am using legacy mode?

 

Finally installed in UEFI mode. I noticed that at bootup, there is no longer any delay where I used to see a blinking cursor after the BIOS screen for a split second before. As far as functionality is concerned, it seems to be the same as Legacy mode. I'm just anal, hence I chose to wipe everything off and start clean.