SSD Vs Hard Disk boot times

[MaeJoMTB]

My 2TB HD takes 180secs to boot into windows 7 with a Chrome Browser window.

Thought this was a bit slow so purchased a Sandisk SSD Plus 240GB for just under 3,000bht.

15 seconds!

Yes that's right, same PC, reduced boot time from 180sec. to 15sec.

(Using the Slimjet version of Google Chrome)

OK, so there's some bloat on the old HD, but surely not 165 seconds of bloat?

Fallout 4 is a lot faster too.

[impulse]

How much faster is it to save a 65Meg Excel file? (if you don't mind me asking.) Don't need a speed test, just your perception.

I'm looking at getting an SSD because I work on a dozen or so big Excel and Access files a day and I spend way too much of my day twiddling my thumbs.

I can live with 180 seconds twice a day when I fire it up... And getting IT authorization to replace a HD anywhere on their sacred network may offset a few weeks of gain from the SSD. But if I can save 10 minutes a day saving those files, I can pay out the SSD in a week, even with the time to move Win7 to the SSD.

[4evermaat]

It's not the HDD drive itself that is faulty, it's just that SSDs are much faster than HDDs because they use 100% flash drive technology, no moving parts, less power draw, etc. See a full article here: http://www.storagereview.com/ssd_vs_hdd

Price has come down a lot for the smaller SSD drives. But it still is affordable to have SSD (120-500gb) as the main drive with the operating system and then 1-2TB HDD drive as the secondary drive to store large files.

For laptops: remove the internal dvd drive and replace it with an hdd tray. so you use SSD as primary hd and then larger HDD as a secondary HD

[WhizBang]

I replaced the 640GB HD in my laptop with a 1TB SSD. Night and day difference. In addition to a much faster boot time, everything else is faster too. But the biggest improvement has been the complete lack of BSOD occurances, something I used to get 2 or 3 times a week with the HD.

[SoiBiker]

Boot times aren't really very important these days. I doubt I reboot my computer more than once a month anyway.

[impulse]

I replaced the 640GB HD in my laptop with a 1TB SSD. Night and day difference. In addition to a much faster boot time, everything else is faster too. But the biggest improvement has been the complete lack of BSOD occurances, something I used to get 2 or 3 times a week with the HD.

I haven't had a BSOD since I moved to Win7, thru Win8.1 and now Win10. Am I just lucky?

(Vista truly sucked, XP was fine after years of dialing it in, but the first couple of years were rough. Got MUCH better when I uninstalled all things Symantec, though they didn't make that easy..)

Thanks for the input. I'm off for an SSD tomorrow, hoping more than 1/2 of Fortune Town is open.

Got any brand recommendations, or are they all "the same"?

[impulse]

Boot times aren't really very important these days. I doubt I reboot my computer more than once a month anyway.

Twice a day- when I go to work, and when I come back home. (And occasionally when I have a TSR problem and my RAM goes away)

[crabdog]

I replaced the 640GB HD in my laptop with a 1TB SSD. Night and day difference. In addition to a much faster boot time, everything else is faster too. But the biggest improvement has been the complete lack of BSOD occurances, something I used to get 2 or 3 times a week with the HD.

I haven't had a BSOD since I moved to Win7, thru Win8.1 and now Win10. Am I just lucky?

(Vista truly sucked, XP was fine after years of dialing it in, but the first couple of years were rough. Got MUCH better when I uninstalled all things Symantec, though they didn't make that easy..)

Thanks for the input. I'm off for an SSD tomorrow, hoping more than 1/2 of Fortune Town is open.

Got any brand recommendations, or are they all "the same"?

Samsung EVO long been regarded as the best SSD for price/performance.

[Pib]

I put SSDs in three of my laptops...an i7 CPU laptop, a Pentium Core Duo laptop, and a Celeron laptop....big improvements in boot times, they were significantly faster in opening/reading programs, Windows updates went much faster since write activity on a SSD can be 10 to 100 times faster than a HDD, etc. The SSD made the biggest speed improvement on my Pentium and Celeron laptops. On the i7 laptop which already booted fast it improved boot time by around 30% and speed of programs operations/read/write was definitely noticeable. And if you are a person that goes mobile with your laptop vs it living on desk a SSD won't be damaged bouncing/moving your laptop around like an HDD with its spinning platter, floating heads would be susceptible to fast/hard movement.

I probably going to be buying another computer over coming months and it will most likely come with a HDD and probably 4GB of RAM since that's pretty much a standard configuration unless you special order a computer. The first two things I will do will swap out the HDD for a SSD and up the RAM from 4 to 8GB....use the HDD I take out as a external drive. The upgrade from 4 to 8GB won't be that noticeable but the SSD will be like adding a supercharger to an engine.

Some may ask why don't computer manufacturers put a SSD in all the models they sale or even start them off with 8GB RAM? Well, it's purely a cost/competition thing, plus adding more RAM and a SSD is really just a speed-boost thing. Many people could care less about the computer booting significantly faster especially if the leave their computer on all the time and based on the way they use their computer 4GB of RAM and HDD work just fine.

[Pib]

I replaced the 640GB HD in my laptop with a 1TB SSD. Night and day difference. In addition to a much faster boot time, everything else is faster too. But the biggest improvement has been the complete lack of BSOD occurances, something I used to get 2 or 3 times a week with the HD.

I haven't had a BSOD since I moved to Win7, thru Win8.1 and now Win10. Am I just lucky?

(Vista truly sucked, XP was fine after years of dialing it in, but the first couple of years were rough. Got MUCH better when I uninstalled all things Symantec, though they didn't make that easy..)

Thanks for the input. I'm off for an SSD tomorrow, hoping more than 1/2 of Fortune Town is open.

Got any brand recommendations, or are they all "the same"?

Samsung EVO long been regarded as the best SSD for price/performance.

^^^^Ditto recommendation on a Samsung SSD. I used a Samsung 840EVO 500GB for around 1.5 years...love it. It's now an older model and 850 EVOs is probably what your find on store shelves.

Samsung also provides a great little software utility (free) with their SSDs called Samsung Magician which provides SMART info (drive health), firmware update, performance optimization, firmware update, RAPID MODE to make the SSD even faster and variety of other features. Many SSD manufacturers do not provide such a software utility...I know...my other two SSD are a Seagate and Kingston and the few software utilities that are available for these drivers is like comparing DOS 1.0 and Win 10.

[MaeJoMTB]

Got any brand recommendations, or are they all "the same"?

I looked at Kingston SSDNow and Sandisk SSD Plus.... 240GB @ 2,950bht

They were the same price and the shop had them both.

Review said Kingston less than half the speed of Sandisk, so I bought the Sandisk.

Sandisk has a 3 year warranty too.

[Pib]

Watch out for some of the Kingston SSD models are they use slower flash memory on some of their lower cost models...don't ask what the models are because I have forgotten now from my research over a year ago, but if you google the issue you'll come across plenty of reviews/webpages talking this issue. But even a Kingston SSD with the slower flash memory will run circles around any HDD.

Edited December 6, 2015 by Pib

[impulse]

Sorry for the questions: How difficult (and time required) was it to transfer the OS and load MS Office, etc. to the SSD, assuming a legal copy of Win10 on existing HD, or did you just do a clean install of OS, programs, etc?

Microsoft pull any shenanigans, or put you on hold for an hour?

[gerry123]

180sec. to 15sec.

life is so short ??

[MaeJoMTB]

Sorry for the questions: How difficult (and time required) was it to transfer the OS and load MS Office, etc. to the SSD, assuming a legal copy of Win10 on existing HD, or did you just do a clean install of OS, programs, etc?

Microsoft pull any shenanigans, or put you on hold for an hour?

Less than an hour for a new install of Windows 7

Inc all the drivers. From USB boot disk.

Fastest time ever for me.

No MS bloat, just Slimjet browser and Fallout 4.

Edited December 6, 2015 by MaeJoMTB

[Gary A]

I have an old HP Mini with the Atom processor. I installed Linux Mint and it was still nearly too slow to use. I bought a relatively cheap Intel SSD and now have Windows 10 running. Boot time is about 40 seconds and shut down is much faster. The SSD has given the old netbook a new life. I spent the money on the SSD thinking that if the netbook was still slow, I'd replace the hard drive in my laptop with it. I'm sold on them. If I have a hard drive failure on any of my machines I'll replace it with an SSD.

[Pib]

Sorry for the questions: How difficult (and time required) was it to transfer the OS and load MS Office, etc. to the SSD, assuming a legal copy of Win10 on existing HD, or did you just do a clean install of OS, programs, etc?

Microsoft pull any shenanigans, or put you on hold for an hour?

About 15 to 90 minutes using Cloning software (depends on the cloning software and how much data is on your hard drive). Personally, I use the Macrium Reflect-Free which is a backup program that also includes a cloning feature. Most SSDs will come with cloning software from the manufacturer. Like Samsung comes with a program called Samsung Data Migration which clones your drive.

I used the Samsung Data Migration program to clone my HDD to my Samsung SSD 840EVO but discovered a few days later I had an issue with using the Windows backup function....everything else worked fine to include my Office applications...all applications worked fine...just that built-in Windows functions for during image backups as I occasionally do a image backup that way versus always using Macrium to do my image backups. I then recloned the HDD to SSD using the cloning feature in Macrium Relfect-Free and the problem went away..the problem was the Samsung Data Migration had failed to properly size my drive's System Reserved partition...the Macrium cloning properly sized it...getting to detailed on this issue so I'll stop. Whatever cloning program you use, DO NOT start using your old HDD for anything else until you are sure the cloning worked 100%....just tuck that HDD away for a few weeks before using it for something else. Summary: cloning makes it a piece of cake...and there are various freeware programs out there that can clone your drives.

Basically, you just clone the HDD to SSD. Then remove the HDD, insert the SSD, and the computer boots up just like it did with the HDD (but much faster). It does not affect any software activation, etc.

You can also just created yourself a Windows image backup using the built in Windows backup/image funciton along with a rescue/bootup disk. First create an image of your current HDD to another internal/external drive. Then power down, removed HDD, insert HDD, boot-up using the rescue disk and reload the Windows image to the SSD. Basically you have just cloned your HDD to your SSD. But you need another internel/external backup drive to do this to first create the image backup. I prefer using a cloning program...and for those folks which don't have an another drive to create an image backup the cloning approach does not require another drive.

[TheCruncher]

Sorry for the questions: How difficult (and time required) was it to transfer the OS and load MS Office, etc. to the SSD, assuming a legal copy of Win10 on existing HD, or did you just do a clean install of OS, programs, etc?

Microsoft pull any shenanigans, or put you on hold for an hour?

Less than an hour for a new install of Windows 7

Inc all the drivers. From USB boot disk.

Fastest time ever for me.

No MS bloat, just Slimjet browser and Fallout 4.

I installed a new Windows 7 from USB disk to a mechanical disk just a week ago, and it took me less than half an hour from start to finish.

[Pib]

Just as FYI, below are some disk speed tests using Crystal Disk Mark 5.X of my Samsung 840EVO 500GB SSD with and without Rapid Mode enabled. Rapid Mode basically uses up to 1GB of your RAM memory to supplement the SSD in it's read/write operations.

If you want to compare to your HDD/SSD you might want to also use Crystal Disk Mark 5.X as varioius disk drive speed testers use different algorithms to run their test.

For you folks using HDDs I think you will notice that below SSD speed results are many, many times faster than your HDD. And although people and manufacturer's advertisements tend to focus on the large file sequential read speed, the write speed/random write speed probably has an equal impact on how fast your computer will run/respond in real life...and write speed on a SSD is many, many, many times faster than an HDD can ever hope to be.

840EVO 500GB "Without" Rapid Mode Enabled

840EVO 500GB "With" Rapid Mode Enabled

[4evermaat]

Samsung, Kingston, OCZ, are all pretty good

MemoryToday in FortuneTown IT mall will install the SSD for you if you bring in laptop. They can also install the hdd tray if you remove the internal DVD drive. So you can use a spare HDD drive as a second drive for more space. you can also get an external USB case for the DVD drive. How often do you use an actual DVD drive vs storing files on your hard drive? You can also order and they will ship EMS for free. But it is better to do it in person to get the full service.

Also, I think they can clone data for you from old hard drive....but honestly it is better usually to start fresh with windows, install all of the drivers and basic programs that you use often unless you have an image program like Acronis true image backup. and it was a backup from when you first got the laptop or did a fresh install with all the drivers.

But best to make an image backup with just fresh install of windows OS and all working drivers. Then make another incremental backup when you install the important software. if you want. Windows OS and proper drivers are what takes the most amount of time when starting from scratch. An acronis usb boot disk backing up an image took like 7 minutes to restore win7+drivers backup that was 15 or 20GB on SSD. And that was a Sata 2 or sata 3. My SSD is pretty old. Newer ones have only gotten better and cheaper

Edited December 6, 2015 by 4evermaat

[Pib]

Samsung, Kingston, OCZ, are all pretty good

MemoryToday in FortuneTown IT mall will install the SSD for you if you bring in laptop. They can also install the hdd tray if you remove the internal DVD drive. So you can use a spare HDD drive as a second drive for more space. you can also get an external USB case for the DVD drive. How often do you use an actual DVD drive vs storing files on your hard drive? You can also order and they will ship EMS for free. But it is better to do it in person to get the full service.

Also, I think they can clone data for you from old hard drive....but honestly it is better usually to start fresh with windows, install all of the drivers and basic programs that you use often unless you have an image program like Acronis true image backup. and it was a backup from when you first got the laptop or did a fresh install with all the drivers.

But best to make an image backup with just fresh install of windows OS and all working drivers. Then make another incremental backup when you install the important software. if you want. Windows OS and proper drivers is what takes the most amount of time.

Don't understand why you say it's best to do a fresh install of OS? I definitely would not take that approached. With a cloning/image reload approach you are making/transferring an image copy of your HDD...every bit and byte on the HDD will now be on the SSD. And the SDD does not require any special driver to operate just like the HDD does not require any special driver to operate.

[4evermaat]

Samsung, Kingston, OCZ, are all pretty good

MemoryToday in FortuneTown IT mall will install the SSD for you if you bring in laptop. They can also install the hdd tray if you remove the internal DVD drive. So you can use a spare HDD drive as a second drive for more space. you can also get an external USB case for the DVD drive. How often do you use an actual DVD drive vs storing files on your hard drive? You can also order and they will ship EMS for free. But it is better to do it in person to get the full service.

Also, I think they can clone data for you from old hard drive....but honestly it is better usually to start fresh with windows, install all of the drivers and basic programs that you use often unless you have an image program like Acronis true image backup. and it was a backup from when you first got the laptop or did a fresh install with all the drivers.

But best to make an image backup with just fresh install of windows OS and all working drivers. Then make another incremental backup when you install the important software. if you want. Windows OS and proper drivers is what takes the most amount of time.

Don't understand why you say it's best to do a fresh install of OS? I definitely would not take that approached. With a cloning/image reload approach you are making/transferring an image copy of your HDD...every bit and byte on the HDD will now be on the SSD. And the SDD does not require any special driver to operate just like the HDD does not require any special driver to operate.

There must be enough room on the target SSD drive to do this.

The larger the image, the greater the chance of data corruption. But yes, if you have the space, you can attempt the image/clone operation. I recommend it, especially if you have an image of just windows OS + drivers. then re-add programs you need from there. You might be surprised how much crap you had previously.

[Pib]

Yes, if say replacing a 1TB HDD that's pretty full with a say a 500GB SSD then cloning will not work. And it can also depend on how a person has their desktop or laptop computer setup partition-wise, maybe a desktop with a smaller HDD just running the OS and the person data on a second drive, etc.

But if a person is just replacing a HDD with a SSD and that SSD is big enough to handle all the data on the HDD, then cloning/reloading an image will do a bit for bit copy/mirror image...done and running in a very short while.

Edited December 6, 2015 by Pib

[Tywais]

I replaced my old, probably 5 years, OCZ Vertex 3 120GB with the Samsung 850 Pro 256GB as I needed more space and a large bump in speed was useful for my gaming. You can use the below site for real world, that is users experience, to compare SSDs. The speed difference from the upgrade was quite significant but of course nothing like going from HD to SSD itself. As they say, if you go SSD you'll never go back.

http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Samsung-850-Pro-256GB-vs-OCZ-Vertex-3-MAX-IOPS-240GB/2385vs376

BTW - I did a clone transfer from the OCZ to the Samsung as I had a stable system with all my drivers and apps already on it.

[impulse]

If cloning is possible, that would save hours of installing programs and even more time tweaking the settings, even if I could find the original disks- which could take even longer.

Installing Windows is bad enough, but then there's Corel Draw, MS Office, Chrome and Firefox and T-Bird and half a dozen freeware anti-viruses, etc. Then there's registering the new install on all of them IF they don't throw up a red flag because this is Asia and I bought them in the USA, etc.

Back in the day, I counted on 1-2 solid days of non-productive time whenever I had to change computers or swap HD's if I couldn't clone the old one because it failed.

Clean installs are ginger peachy keen, and that's the way I'd go if they still allowed slavery, but...

[Pib]

I hear you....a Clean Install, reloading of all my software I have loaded over the years, tweaking that software to the way I like it, etc., is something I only do when I absolutely have no other choice and feel like self-flagellation for a few days to maybe months.

[NeverSure]

I had a bit of a fight cloning my 1TB HDD to my Samsung 850 EVO (500GB.) I didn't have too much data except that the original HDD shipped with four partitions which in total were too big. None of my cloning software would automatically shrink those partitions and I suspect that it was due to "unmovable files."

The only partition manager I found (free) that would shrink those partitions adequately was MiniTool Partition Wizard. I believe it worked because it was the only proggy that did it's work outside of Windows, using a shut down and restart process while doing the work similar to Windows Update. It shows its progress during shutdown and restart in a way that's similar to Update.

I also needed to shrink all partitions to a size slightly smaller than the total on the new SSD and then I later could expand the partition that contained the C drive (%system% drive.)

To recap, I had to shrink the partition that contained the C drive until the total partition sizes were about 400GB, and only then clone it to the new SSD, and then expand that partition back out to fill the whole SSD.

Once I figured out what I needed to do in the order I needed to do them it was a breeze.

Edited December 6, 2015 by NeverSure

[BuaBS]

If you boot your PC 1 or 2 times a day , does boottime really matter ?

In BIOS you can choose for a quick or full-check start.

I'm on a 2,5' 5400 rpm HDD , and is surf ready in 60 sec ( so everything loaded and browser open).

Do I really care that a SSD could do it in 10 sec ? NO!

[impulse]

If you boot your PC 1 or 2 times a day , does boottime really matter ?

In BIOS you can choose for a quick or full-check start.

I'm on a 2,5' 5400 rpm HDD , and is surf ready in 60 sec ( so everything loaded and browser open).

Do I really care that a SSD could do it in 10 sec ? NO!

It ain't just about the boot time. Boot time is just an indication of how much faster many things will be happening with an SSD.

Try opening, modifying and saving a few dozen 60-100 meg Excel files a day. I can start opening or saving one, go down to the water cooler and get a drink and come back and it's still working on it. Literally, I spend easily half an hour to an hour every day watching the little status bar opening and saving Excel files. If I can cut that by half, the SSD has paid for itself in the first or second day, given my fully absorbed labor rate. That's a savings to the company of $20-30,000 USD a year. From a $100-300 SSD.

BTW, what pisses me off about it is that the same logic will force me to pay for a company SSD out of my own pocket rather than waste hours of my time filling out IT request forms and going up the chain of command to convince the company to buy one. But that's a whole 'nother thread...

Edited December 6, 2015 by impulse

[sierra01]

I replaced the 640GB HD in my laptop with a 1TB SSD. Night and day difference. In addition to a much faster boot time, everything else is faster too. But the biggest improvement has been the complete lack of BSOD occurances, something I used to get 2 or 3 times a week with the HD.

I haven't had a BSOD since I moved to Win7, thru Win8.1 and now Win10. Am I just lucky?

(Vista truly sucked, XP was fine after years of dialing it in, but the first couple of years were rough. Got MUCH better when I uninstalled all things Symantec, though they didn't make that easy..)

Thanks for the input. I'm off for an SSD tomorrow, hoping more than 1/2 of Fortune Town is open.

Got any brand recommendations, or are they all "the same"?

Samsung EVO long been regarded as the best SSD for price/performance.

Ive just replaced a 250GB Samsung 840 EVO with a 500GB 850 EVO, great SSD's