SSD Drives

madtownidiot said:

Actually it takes longer to come out of hibernation than to start up cold. And why does 3 1/2 seconds sound so incredible? Total startup time including POST is about 15 seconds, but once the system decides it's ready to boot, it only needs to read about 300 MB to load the desktop, which probably takes less than 2 seconds.

It seems unreasonable because I have never seen a machine run this fast. I'm running an SSD drive and don't get this type of performance. Even the guys with SSD drives on this forum in the Reboot Time thread aren't showing startup times in under 15 seconds.

This is the result of my machine booting from an SSD drive (Intel X25-M Gen 2 80GB)


So, After POST (which takes about 20 seconds on my machine), it's 16 seconds to the logon screen. My password is fairly complex...thus the additional time after logon to hit the actual desktop. That's running on a Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R mobo, with an Intel Quad Core Q9550 overclocked to 3.2Ghz, with 8GB of G.Skill DDR2 800 RAM with 4-4-4-12 timings and the Intel X25-M Gen 2 SSD drive. So, clearly I don't have a terrible box with a super fast drive.


Edit : Here was the story talking about the 11 second boot times....http://news.softpedia.com/news/The-W...e-122111.shtml

And another article from Technet forums where user describes getting to 14 seconds with an SSD Drive
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/...0-79e8c95ae965

Decent discussion on Intel SSD forum discussing boot times;
http://communities.intel.com/message...94AA.node5COMS

So, as you can see, if you are getting boots in less than 4 seconds...you are 3x to 4x faster than any of these other people.

madtownidiot said:

Yeah, you have a pretty fast system, but the i7 systems with ddr3 memory and an ssd will run circles around it.

But during the boot up process....those circles won't make that kind of difference. Like that link above showed, the 11 second bootup was on a Core i7 machine. And DDR3 memories have higher latencies...so there is not that much difference between my low timing DDR2 and the faster DDR3 ram.

I simply think there is something fishy with your 3.5 second number. That's just way too fast. Anyway you can post a video of this up to youtube or something?

madtownidiot said:

Just because your hardware can't do it, doesn't mean it can't be done. Stop answering my posts in a condescending tone that makes it sound as if you know everything there is to know and everyone else is full of shit. If you don't like what I have to say, ignore it.

I apologize for my tone and any offense that you took to my comments. Your boot times rank as the fastest that I have ever heard of...that was why I questioned it. I've also seen situations where the time to boot was measured from different points and to different points...so it's important to know how it was measured to be sure we are comparing apples to apples.

I posted simply to prevent somebody from purchasing an SSD drive expecting a sub 5 second boot up process and being disappointed if their boot times were in the 10-20 second range which I believe to be the norm for SSD drives on Windows 7 systems.

I will refrain from commenting anymore on your specific situation in this thread. Again, I apologize for my tone in previous threads.

I was wondering how one could get a 3.5 second boot also. I have spent a lot of time and money on my system and I don't think it's possible without major hardware and thousands....possibly tens of thousands of dollars. I would like to see it (a 3.5 second boot) though.

Yeah, laptops certainly do power up quickly and get through the POST in a hurry compared to a desktop. And I am willing to bet that quite a number of people use their SSD's with their laptops rather than with their desktop.

For example, I have time tested my work laptop (Dell Latitude E6400 with P8600 Core 2 Duo at 2.40Ghz, 4GB of RAM and Windows 7 Enterprise 32-bit running on a 7,200RPM laptop hard drive). Using a stopwatch, I've timed the following
--power on until POST complete and Starting Windows 7 appears : 7 seconds
--From Starting Windows 7 until CTRL-ALT-DEL screen appears: 24 seconds (31 seconds total)

Comparing this to my home desktop ( Core 2 Quad Q9550 at 3.2ghz, 8GB of RAM, Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R Rev 1.1 mobo, using Windows 7 64-bit, and an SSD drive)
--power on until monitor first turns on: 9 seconds
--delay between when monitor comes alive and POST appears: 2 seconds (11 seconds total)
--Time which POST starts and runs until it says Starting Windows: 11 seconds (22 seconds total)
--Time from Starting Windows until CTRL-ALT-DEL appears: 13 seconds (35 seconds total).


Overall, your restart time of 28 seconds is super fast. Very Impressive My restart time on my laptop comes in around 70 seconds...but that is on a domain, with a complex password which I must type in and a mechanical hard drive.

I'll have to run that VBS file on my home computer to see where it clocks in.

Hmm...I've never had a bad experience with Corsair on a rebate or an RMA. I had a Flash Voyager that the USB connector broke right off. They exchanged in immediately. I've had rebates on a power supply and flash drive as well that have come right in.

Mwave has that same SSD for $124.99. They had a $20 MIR, but I believe it expired last week from the mfg;
http://www.mwave.com/mwave/skusearch...#aShoppingCart

I bought my SSD from mwave and didn't have any problems.