Solid state discs and vista boot

[tomkat2006]

My boot took around 1min 9 seconds to boot with 8gb ram and a 10k raptor boot drive, I thought this was a bit slow, especially considering Id tweaked all the msconfig things etc. I invested in a ssd and found after restoring a backup image to it, speed was exactly the same 1min 9 secs - crap. I tried a raid 7200 drive - same. HOw the hell do people get their systems to boot faster than mine? I heard one guy booting in 6 seconds (this is all from the moment you press the power button). Any secretive tips out there as SSD simply isnt cutting it :-o

 

[damocles]

Does it really matter.....? 1min 9 is good. I would not worry about it to much.

BTW, only mess with processes if you know what you are doing as a disabled process can have a performance knock on effect and actually slow your system down as other processes may need to use it.

As for 6 sec's, what O/S?...hardware?...etc.....I guess that's possible with a really fast SSD but the cost/GB is too high for most people at the moment......but I suspect it's Internet BS

 

[roy69]

if you boot from the computer being in sleep mode then it will be alot faster.

 

[asautt]

If you had ONLY a SSD on your system and had no software such as antivirus, etc. loading on startup you shoud get a pretty quick bootup. If anyone is getting 6 second boots they are tweaked purely for that dubious record and not functionality.

I do have a SSD as a boot drive but my system is definitely not tweaked for boot speed. Haven't timed it but I would guess about 90 seconds from a cold boot through logon and ready to work. BIOS spins up all the drives and the RAID controller is a little slow to do it's thing. Once Vista starts loading I can hear the drives being spun again. That may be because Intel matrix storage manager is installed.

As far as SLEEP, I didn't really see that much improvement. The log on screen would pop right up when awakening, but the mouse and keyboard were dead until all the drives got spun up and checked. After I installed the second video card and enabled SLI the system always hangs up after login. So sleep is not an option anymore for me.

Alan

 

[tomkat2006]

I'd have to agree there Alan, I installed x64 on the SSD standalone, imo the installation took longer than a regular 7200 rpm one, wasnt faster at all. GRANTED when the desktop loaded (going by the green bar this time) it was quite fast. The problem I had was this:

I already have a fully working copy of Vista, with all my progs on it, tweaked in msconfig, boot is defragged, minimal startup etc etc, on a good day your looking at approx 52 seconds cold boot to working desktop.

I bought a SSD after seeing the youtube videos of 10 second boots etc so what I thought I would do is create a ghost copy of my PC and restore it on the SSD as surely it would load MUCH faster... in reality it loaded slower. Why, Ive no idea, it certainly wasnt 25 seconds as some people are getting. Ive 8GB RAM btw so that should speed it up too.

I also tried putting 2 of my idential 7200rpm drives in RAID, didnt see much improvement there either in fact I was better where I was.

Sleep mode affects my PC in the same way, sometimes its fine but more often that not I find the desktop will hang only causing me to reboot the whole thing again anyway.

Ah well, back to the drawing board. I was going to try the 15000rpm cheetah drives but would have to get a SCSI card as well as the HD plus a SAS cable and it all sounds a bit ridiculous to me in the end. Thoughts?

 

[damocles]

what ssd did you get?

 

[tomkat2006]

http://www.play.com//ProductOutline.aspx?title=5984278&r=PCSH

 

[asautt]

I have the same drive only 64G vis 128G.

I did time my startup after my last post. 60 seconds to go through the BIOS boot routine until the Vista "green bars" started. Then 20 seconds to get the log on screen up. Only a few seconds from logon for Node 32 to do it's thing, system tray to load, and ready to go.

Do a search on here or Google 'Vista Sleep Problems" and you get thousands of hits. Sleep seems to be pretty much hit or miss, often related to graphics drivers. Sleep works fine for me with SLI disabled, wake up hangs up with SLI enabled.

With everything else being pretty stable I am not going to worry about a minute and 30 for boot up.

Alan

 

[tomkat2006]

Yeah I found Sli was the culprit, but why disable something when it should just work. Ill have a bucthers at the advice on that prob mind.
I just think it sucks that for new technology its not that great. Cant see them being the future..

 

[damocles]

You probably already know this...but....

You might need to specify the NTFS partition alignment of the drive when formating to improve performance, 128k or 256k..don't leave it at Vista default as vista was not built with ssd's in mind.

All details are here:

SATA SSD Devices - OCZ Forum

 

[asautt]

You have a Yank here so I think I need a translation for "Ill have a bucthers at the advice on that prob mind". :D

I wouldn't be too hard on the SSD technology. If anything it looks like the drive is not the bottleneck, rather BIOS routines and Vista's own load and startup routines. Plus the SSD technology is in it's infancy. Cutting edge is fun but not always satifying.

Alan

 

[tomkat2006]

I understand about the NTFS etc, but if restoring an image to that drive which already is NTFS then there shouldnt have been any slowing down at all.

 

[roy69]

You have a Yank here so I think I need a translation for "Ill have a bucthers at the advice on that prob mind". :D

I wouldn't be too hard on the SSD technology. If anything it looks like the drive is not the bottleneck, rather BIOS routines and Vista's own load and startup routines. Plus the SSD technology is in it's infancy. Cutting edge is fun but not always satifying.

Alan

Translation butchers = look.

 

[tomkat2006]

how he got such a fast boot:

I use Windows XP SP3 32bit but same results on 64bit.

Two SATAII RAID Raptors 10 000RPM setup in RAID 0 = 20 000RPM, Dual Channel 2 x 2GB Kingston HyperX Gaming RAM.

RAM will also help with faster load times.

Make sure you don't download to this setup it could cause it to run slow, download to another drive which isn't in a RAID setup. Also set all none important programs/applications to not start at Windows startup using CCleaner.

From the point I switch the System on to the point Windows Desktop comes on, usually about 6/10 seconds.

 

[asautt]

how he got such a fast boot:

Make sure you don't download to this setup it could cause it to run slow, download to another drive which isn't in a RAID setup.

From this statment it looks like this person keeps their boot RAID drive totally defragged. Like a defrag every run. Probably spends as much time keeping his system tweaked for world record boot times as he saves with his speedy boot.

Not to disparage any of this. It has aroused my interest enough to look at getting my start up times down. I have my SATA drives set as ACHI with SMART enabled so I don't know if I can cut my 60 second BIOS systems checks down much. Will have to check it out.

Alan

 

[tomkat2006]

as a sidenote I notice since I disabled pagefile for the c: drive (boot) I can no longer put in msconfig boot options under advanced (enable max ram), it will show as 2gb but not the 8gb I have. Anyone know why, or a registry entry to fix it?