SSD boot times

Caporegime
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Im looking to finally move to a SSD or 2 in raid 0


How much faster is a Raid 0 compared to a single disk... Not benchmarks i can see them but i mean loading times of OS apps etc.
 
Associate
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I just got an SSD Raid0 myself :).

Booting: After the BIOS the swirly colours (windows 7) only just about form the logo before moving onto the logon screen.

Logging on: After hitting enter at the login screen my desktop is up in max 2 seconds AND is ready to use. ie as soon as I can see the chrome logo and click on it, it'll load within half a second.

Launching Apps: I installed a lot of my smaller apps to the ssd (foobar, mirc) just regularly used everyday apps... they all load amazingly fast. In fact I disabled the window fade in animation as it was making my system seem slower!

Hope that helps!
 
Soldato
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With RAID0 SSD's I'm CPU bottlenecked at login on a 3Ghz Q6600.
They don't feel massively faster than a single drive most of the time, but with SSD pricing the way it is RAID0 is almost the same £/GB as a Single drive (cheaper in some cases).
 
Soldato
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My Vertez RAID 0 is very fast to boot ONCE past the bios screen, although overall it's still slower than I'd like it to be, I just wish post would speed up.

Once UEFI boards come in (Should start arriving from early next year with Sandy Bridge) things aught to be quicker - with an SSD you'll be looking at 15-20 seconds from power on to usable.

TBH though boot times aren't a big deal. The Windows 7 low power suspend mode is awesome. It turns off all the fans, uses almost no power and then wakes up with a nudge of the mouse to return me to where I left off in under a second. I hardly ever shut down any more, SSD's go a long way towards ensuring that your system never feels "bogged down" and in need of a reboot.
 
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if you raid, you may need to wait for you controller to initialize. so it may end up being slower (actual boot time) than a decent single drive..
 
Soldato
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Got to be honest, I'm not too sure why so many folks get so hung up about "improved" boot time with SSD's? There are so many other factors that effect this.
EG. what apps you have kicked off at start up (AV's being the single biggest culprit for slowing start up times), even what mobo / BIOS has an impact (some are just slow to boot). Can't say that I notice a great difference between my Vertex 2E and my Velociraptor to be totally honest. certainly not enough to start waving my willy about (so to speak).

Though applications that run entirely (IE. including files that they access) on the SSD are certainly pretty nippy. Though I don't thing it's quite as life changing as some make out. Depends on what sort of drive set up you come from I suppose. And as most will be coming from an older established system to a new install of Windows, I think you just sort of forget how much quicker things seem on a pristine system. Only my opinion of course.
 
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Soldato
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UEFI is overrated for desktops. Sure it might make a difference on servers, as some servers have seriously slow BIOS bootstraps. I have servers that take 20-30 seconds before they even bring up the first bios screens!.

But my intel desktop board has checked the ram, found the hard drives, and started booting all within about 3 seconds. Then windows 7 takes what 20 -30 seconds after that.. So with a good motherboard UEFI might say what 1-2 seconds! pfffttt. And if you use S3 sleep instead, its on and back in windows in 2 seconds flat :p

Only thing I can think of that UEFI might offer is easier ways to hack the Apple OS to run on Windows PC's.
 
Soldato
Joined
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2,524
Got to be honest, I'm not too sure why so many folks get so hung up about "improved" boot time with SSD's? There are so many other factors that effect this.
EG. what apps you have kicked off at start up (AV's being the single biggest culprit for slowing start up times), even what mobo / BIOS has an impact (some are just slow to boot). Can't say that I notice a great difference between my Vertex 2E and my Velociraptor to be totally honest. certainly not enough to start waving my willy about (so to speak).

Though applications that run entirely (IE. including files that they access) on the SSD are certainly pretty nippy. Though I don't thing it's quite as life changing as some make out. Depends on what sort of drive set up you come from I suppose. And as most will be coming from an older established system to a new install of Windows, I think you just sort of forget how much quicker things seem on a pristine system. Only my opinion of course.

The nice thing about SSD's is it doesn't really matter how many apps are kicking off, there's not too much difference between a 15s SSD boot and a 30second clean boot from a spinnie, but in my experience you can take a cluttered up spinnie install that takes a good 5 minutes to be usable, clone it onto an SSD and it'll be booting to usable in 20 seconds.

It's the multitasking capabilities of SSD's that make them shine, you can be doing a disk intensive operation like a virus scan or file copy going on and not even notice it in your other apps.

I've got SSD's in three of my computers now, can't stand using spinnie installs when I have to fix a relatives computer. Once they get a bit cheaper I'll probably start gifting them :)
I'd do an SSD upgrade over a CPU upgrade pretty much every time. It's removing a bottleneck.
 
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Soldato
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Zarf

"The nice thing about SSD's is it doesn't really matter how many apps are kicking off, there's not too much difference between a 15s SSD boot and a 30second clean boot from a spinnie..."

Fair comment. Though what I was trying to get at with my slightly tongue in cheak comment... was that I don't see improved boot times as a main selling point for buying an SSD (well not for me at least) And lets be honest, it's the first thing a lot of people seem to go on about.

"t's the multitasking capabilities of SSD's that make them shine, you can be doing a disk intensive operation like a virus scan or file copy going on and not even notice it in your other apps."

Fair enough again. Though might not totally agree with your comment about the virus scan. OK if all your stuff is on SSD's. But most folks will have one as a boot drive and the bulk of their stuff will still be on mechanical drives. And obviously you are still restricted in the speed your Virus scan will take if hitting mechanical hard drives. Same obviously if copying etc. between an SSD and a mech. drive.

Though SSD's are still definately moving in the right direction as far as I'm concerned.
 
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Soldato
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Two observations that I have made since switching to SSDs.

One, the boot time is quicker but it's the fact that it's instantly useable that's so great. The taskbar icons populate instantly, whereas even with a fast RAID0 HDD set up this bit takes more time once the desktop appears.

Two, with one SSD I would see one and a half scrolls of the windows loading bar thingy compared to 3 or so with HDDs in RAID0. With two SSDs in RAID0 it doesn't even get chance to come fully into focus at all! :D
 
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