SSD Boot time

By devnulllore
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Radium

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Hi,
 
Sorry for taking so long to reply to you kind folks. I had not seen any reply before I posted my 1st poke with the information I found.
 
Yes I am using an SAMSUNG 840 Pro Series MZ-7PD128BW for both my Boot and Game drives. My Boot is a 128G as I have found over the year I never even use that when I was installing my games on the boot drive.
 
As for how I am timing it I start a stop watch as soon as I see the post screen and press stop as soon as the Windows 8 lock screen is visible. The average over 20 boots is 18 seconds. I am getting more and more familiar with the Asus UEFI BIOS and have it flashed with the latest available on the Asus site (v.2003). That said this bios is massive and many of the advanced setting elude me so I do not touch them. A tech at Asus, who has sort of nurse maided me through older boards has given me a few minor setting that have reduced load time a bit but they seem trivial.
 
Is anyone familiar enough with this board to give me a good idea on what is needed under very basic Windows 8 usage and what I can disable? I do no overclocking at all and do not plan to anytime soon.
 
In the event manager the latest boot time line shows this:
 
Boot Duration: 30849ms
 
I can only assume the system is counting the time from when the kernel is loaded until all serviced, devices and applications are loaded, but I really don't know.
 
How then can I get this system to boot to its potential? Quite frankly it is night and day compared to my last system which I was posting about 5 times a week for, (my eternal thanks to Budman for helping me keep that Frankenstein monster alive as long as I did).
 
I have free access to Soluto as I was a user from their very beginning so I can try that again. It never did much for my last system but maybe it will for this one.
 
So after reading all your posts I am going to setup Soluto and setup auto login and report back what I can for boot times.
 
Thanks for this amazing information,

 

Upgrade the motherboard firmware to the latest version.

Go through all the settings in the motherboard menus and turn off legacy settings such as XHCI hand-off or BIOS/UEFI controlled power management. Give as much control to the OS as possible.

Enable XMP and all other advanced features that will increase speed or lower the power usage when possible. AHCI has to be turned on unless you run RAID. All settings with "legacy" should be disabled.

Also, make sure that you install the OS in UEFI mode by booting the installation disc through the UEFI boot loader found on the disc and not the standard boot loader.

In the installation program, let the program convert from legacy MBR partition table to GPT. Let it add system partitions by itself.

 

So, once the installation is done, the first things to install are the drivers.

Get the Intel INF Installation Utility.

Get the Intel RST (Rapid Storage) to get the latest AHCI drivers.

 

Keep the amount of background programs to a bare minimum unless you really need the nifty features provided.

UEFI does make an impact on Windows boot duration and it's overall superior when it comes to the available for the OS to take control of the computer.

 

If you don't feel like reinstalling the whole primary hard drive, you can just skip that and dig through all the settings in the UEFI menus and install the latest drivers from Intel.

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Grand Master

neufuse Veteran

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So what does your event log say for your boot up.  BTW my times are all restarts not cold.. neufuse - 17 seconds in eventlog boot is quite fast..  So I assume you load almost nothing?

 

 

 

exactly, I have the basics I absolutely need... no real extra services that don't need to be there (besides the system critical ones), anything that could be a security risk is disabled (the old disable it if you don't use it and know for sure you don't need it motto).. that was just one boot time though from today, previous boots have been as high as 24 seconds, and as low as 16 seconds... it's never the same time twice

 

I'm also running in a pure UEFI mode, no legacy bios... not sure if that is speeding up driver loads or anything since I am using GOP and other UEFI protocols

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devnulllore

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Hi,

 

Well after trying some suggestions (except Resident Elites yet)and installing Soluto it reports this:

 

boot.jpg

 

Which looks pretty good to me. Anyway I am not going to get too much more into it but I do already have the latest bios and will look into the suggestions by Resident Elite.

 

Thanks for the help,

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+BudMan MVC

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27 seconds to responsive desktop seems slow to me with your newer system and an OS that is suppose to boot faster.

I have the same SSD disk, so should be seeing same speed on that. Unless your loading a lot of stuff, you should be faster than my old system running old bios, not uefi on old I5 cpu from 2011.

Are you not getting the performance out of the SSD that you should be - what is your benchmarks from samsung magician show?

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Marshall Veteran

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Why have more than needed?

I don't like hidden icons so I've only hidden some of the system icons because I never use any of them.

The first ?con from the left is annoying. But there's no way to disable it other than using msconfig or regedit. I'm not sure how it affects the use of the software so I just keep it there and sometimes I just right-click and shut it down.

ckoi.png

ISO 8601 is the best!

 

What program is on the far left that you find so annoying?  If you don't use it why don't you uninstall it, or disable the service via services.msc.

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Radium

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What program is on the far left that you find so annoying?  If you don't use it why don't you uninstall it, or disable the service via services.msc.

It's a certificate application used to identify myself to government services online.

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Grand Master

MillionVoltss

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Might be because you've spilt the Primary Partition, Try keeping the SSD as one. Also check its performing at its speed, Im guessing 500mbs.

 

Side note, I asked somewhere else. Vertex 2 60mb to Samsung 840 Evo 256mb worth it ?

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devnulllore

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27 seconds to responsive desktop seems slow to me with your newer system and an OS that is suppose to boot faster.

I have the same SSD disk, so should be seeing same speed on that. Unless your loading a lot of stuff, you should be faster than my old system running old bios, not uefi on old I5 cpu from 2011.

Are you not getting the performance out of the SSD that you should be - what is your benchmarks from samsung magician show?

Yes, it just does not seem on par with other 840 Pros with similar specs. 
 
I Have the latest firmware.
I Ran Performance Optimization, yes I know that won't effect the benchmark but I have not done this in quite a while.
Oh, and I also have it overprivisioned.
 
Benchmark Results
 
Sequential Read: 561
Sequential Write: 147
Random Read: 86375
Random Write: 33980
 
Thanks,
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Max Norris

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Not too bad I suppose, recently rebuilt this one system for my daughter and curious as to how it stacked up. Frankenbuild of random parts which includes a 6 core Vishera OC'd to 4.5GHz and a Samsung 840 Pro 256GB, Windows 7, user directory isn't on the SSD and has a moderate number of programs starting up with it.  That's cold obviously, usually it's asleep.

 

2gt2.png

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devnulllore

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Well, in the Samsung Magician software there is the OS optimization tool but it seems to want to load some settings I always understood were not good for desktop system as opposed to something like a server.

 

It wants to do this:
 
Enable Hibernate
 
Enable Large System Cache
 
Set VM to a static 200M size
 
Enable Indexing
 
Turn off super and prefetch (which I do anyway)
 
Deavtivate Write-Cache Buffer 
 
Deavtivate Write-Cache Buffer Flushing (Already Done)
 
Enable High Performance Power Plan (Not sure if I should change anything)
 
Manualy set system restore settings (I don't use it, I use True Image to make snapshots)
 
Just checking on these.
 
Thanks,
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Radium

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Making sure that AHCI is enabled and that you have the latest Intel INF and Intel RST installed is a key to enable all hardware features of a Intel chipset and all its integrated components.

Intel INF is not important to update if your board is more than a few months old. Install once and the OS takes care of the rest.

Updating Intel RST is important as long as the controller you use is still supported by the software.

Failing to turn on AHCI and installing the proper drivers will yield bad performance and things such as NCQ and TRIM might not function as intended.

I can't put more emphasis on this:

If you have a Intel chipset, install Intel INF.

If you have an Intel ATA/SATA controller (integrated into chipset or not), install the latest version of Intel RST that supports your controller and OS.

This applies regardless of what type of devices you connect to the motherboard and the manufacturer of the device.

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devnulllore

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Making sure that AHCI is enabled and that you have the latest Intel INF and Intel RST installed is a key to enable all hardware features of a Intel chipset and all its integrated components.

Intel INF is not important to update if your board is more than a few months old. Install once and the OS takes care of the rest.

Updating Intel RST is important as long as the controller you use is still supported by the software.

Failing to turn on AHCI and installing the proper drivers will yield bad performance and things such as NCQ and TRIM might not function as intended.

I can't put more emphasis on this:

If you have a Intel chipset, install Intel INF.

If you have an Intel ATA/SATA controller (integrated into chipset or not), install the latest version of Intel RST that supports your controller and OS.

This applies regardless of what type of devices you connect to the motherboard and the manufacturer of the device.

HI,

 

Not entirely sure if this was just a reply for the last person but just to sum up I do have AHCI enabled and the latest Intel INF. It is my understanding that the Intel RST driver was for Raid setups only, I do not have a Raid setup. Do I in fact still need this?

 

Sorry for the ignorance on this subject.

 

Thanks,

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Radium

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HI,

 

Not entirely sure if this was just a reply for the last person but just to sum up I do have AHCI enabled and the latest Intel INF. It is my understanding that the Intel RST driver was for Raid setups only, I do not have a Raid setup. Do I in fact still need this?

 

Sorry for the ignorance on this subject.

 

Thanks,

Intel RST is for AHCI and RAID.

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Grand Master

+Red King Subscriber²

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The boot time is in the Event Viewer seems very wrong FYI.

 

I get 23511ms which seems extremely off, probably because it is going by Skydrive and Rainmeter start time.

 

 

EDIT: Yep, just rebooted again and pulled up Even Viewer. It doesn't even have an "Windows has started up:" event for this reboot.

EDIT2: Clean reboot 18085ms in Event Viewer. Any one know how much this time is affected by having one mechanical HD with 2 SSDs?

Edited by _Alexander
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+BudMan MVC

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Your going to want RST yes - will allow you to easy enable or disable LPM from there depending on what you want.  Your low IOPS might be due to LPM being enabled.

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MindTrickz

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Curious how your timing it.. You mention to the login screen..  18 seconds seems kind of long to me with a SSD, I have the same one your using for your boot.  Your using the 840 pro?  You stated that in your text, but in the specs you listed you only say 840 series.  Thought win8 was suppose to be faster boot?  I'm still on win7

 

So as you can see from the soluto log, I'm too a responsive desktop in 19 seconds.  And I am using much older/cheaper hardware than you for sure..  Old dell xps 8300 box..

 

attachicon.gifboottime.png

 

And you don't list number of apps - but I run quite a bit total of 64..  I would be curious to see what soluto gives you for boot time.  Its free, you can always uninstall it you don't like it, etc.

 

But thinking your just looking at your watch or something for a time - which is not always very accurate way of doing a benchmark ;)

 

I have never been one to try and tweak bootup - doesn't really matter to me since my box is on 24/7 etc..  But the SSD sure are quick!!  Wish I would of joined the party a few years back..

 

edit: ok so moved a couple apps to delayed start.. So now I am to a responsive desktop in 18 seconds.. Same time it takes yours to get to login screen? 

 

attachicon.giftweakedboot.png

 

Setup autologin and lets see what your soluto says for your boot time..

 

 

Those writes seem a bit low.

attachicon.gifbenchmarksssd.png

Do you have LPM turned off? Do you have latest intel RST installed?

 

What software are you using in those two pics?

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psionicinversion

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HI,

 

Not entirely sure if this was just a reply for the last person but just to sum up I do have AHCI enabled and the latest Intel INF. It is my understanding that the Intel RST driver was for Raid setups only, I do not have a Raid setup. Do I in fact still need this?

 

Sorry for the ignorance on this subject.

 

Thanks,

 

Make sure AHCI is enabled on your drive thats a biggy but you do realise that the SSD's speed at loading up an OS in NOT in its read write speed???? its in its seek time. normal HD's are like 7ms and SSD is like less then 0.1ms thats what loads an OS up fast. Finding, searching and executing tons of small files really fast. dont get into the whole speed game becuase unless your loading games/app off your SSD youll never see an internal wiorte speed that high. Your highest speed is limited to the jhighest bit of low tech ou have

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Grand Master

devnulllore

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Your going to want RST yes - will allow you to easy enable or disable LPM from there depending on what you want.  Your low IOPS might be due to LPM being enabled.

OK, done. Working great. SO on a similar subject, the Samsung SSD that is, I have Perfectdisk, because I got it for free in a contest and us it for my platter drives, and even though I turned off all the automatic disk defraging and optiwrite etc.. it still runs this program called "pdboot.exe" at boot. Not sure what it does but on monitoring it it starts about 1 minute after boot and literally flashes meaning it runs for about a second and stops. Should I just leave it or is this some type of automatic boot time defrag process?

 

Thanks,

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