Slow Boot from SSD (46sec)

[Samwood]

Hi everyone,

My PC is booting very slowly from my SSD. I takes 46 seconds from pressing the power button to the windows welcome sound, and a further 10 (aprox) seconds to 0% CPU.
I have Intel rapid start installed, no GUI boot enabled and only essential systems opening on boot (9 items in system tray). I have tested the SSD which is running at (within 5% of) new speeds.

I have read quite a few of these 'speed up your boot times' tutorials, and tried almost everything suggested, but this has only shaved a total of 5 seconds (from 51 seconds) off of my boot time.

Any ideas what the issue might be? For a lot of the boot time the Asus (bios) logo is showing, is there any way to reduce this?

All system specs below.

Regards,
Sam

[chrestomanci]

How much of that time is the bios? My linux box takes about a minute to boot with an SSD, but 40 seconds of that is the bios post.

[Funkstar]

Any ideas what the issue might be? For a lot of the boot time the Asus (bios) logo is showing, is there any way to reduce this?

Probably not. You'll need to make sure there there aren't options in the BIOS to speed things up, like reducing the number of checks etc. Despite various attempts over the years, the PC BIOS is still the thing that hinders a smooth cold boot on custom built systems. The large OEMs seem to be able to get BIOS routines that take a few seconds, but motherboards we buy ourselves don't seem to be able to do this.

[shaithis]

Disabling legacy and forcing EFI in BIOS and then re-installing windows can take a fair amount of time off.

Also options in BIOS:
Disable PS2 mouse/keyboard detection
Set USB initialisation to fast/partial if available

[Unique]

you can save about 5 seconds by disabling GUI boot (that stops the coloured "lights" bit in win7 and makes you wonder what's going wrong then you have a boot problem). i imagine most of your 46 seconds is BIOS so look at the settings there. my BIOS takes about 3 times as long to pass as windows does to boot, or at least it seems like it. this is main due to raid cards initialising

[Phage]

you can save about 5 seconds by disabling GUI boot

Aha ! I wondered about that. Googling now.

[holy god of nil]

Latest firmware upgrade I did on my sandisk significantly improved boot time.

[Samwood]

How much of that time is the bios? My linux box takes about a minute to boot with an SSD, but 40 seconds of that is the bios post.

Its about 50% maybe a little more, so 20-25sec. Windows boot time is pretty quick.

Probably not. You'll need to make sure there there aren't options in the BIOS to speed things up, like reducing the number of checks etc. Despite various attempts over the years, the PC BIOS is still the thing that hinders a smooth cold boot on custom built systems. The large OEMs seem to be able to get BIOS routines that take a few seconds, but motherboards we buy ourselves don't seem to be able to do this.

Ultrabooks are required to boot in under 9 seconds (7 seconds for any to be released past 01.01.2013), so I wonder why we can't get this from self-build PC mobos - would be a great selling point!

Disabling legacy and forcing EFI in BIOS and then re-installing windows can take a fair amount of time off.

Also options in BIOS:
Disable PS2 mouse/keyboard detection
Set USB initialisation to fast/partial if available

Thanks, I'll have a look for these.

you can save about 5 seconds by disabling GUI boot (that stops the coloured "lights" bit in win7 and makes you wonder what's going wrong then you have a boot problem). i imagine most of your 46 seconds is BIOS so look at the settings there. my BIOS takes about 3 times as long to pass as windows does to boot, or at least it seems like it. this is main due to raid cards initialising

Already done buddy!


I do have a further question to my OP:
I have 3 HDD installed (inc. 1 external HDD) - if I swap these with a single, new, faster HDD (ditch all the other HDDs and only keep the new one + my SSD) will this help bios boot times? It should do right?
My thought process is that it takes a second or 2 to check each bootable drive, and as Unique said, his raid system slows things down a fair bit.

Sam

p.s. Thanks for all your help so far. Keep any helpful suggestions coming!

[IronWarrior]

Do you really want to give up more HDD space for a extra second?

[Funkstar]

Ultrabooks are required to boot in under 9 seconds (7 seconds for any to be released past 01.01.2013), so I wonder why we can't get this from self-build PC mobos - would be a great selling point!

it's probably because Ultrabooks can't do what a custom built desktop system can do. It can't have multiple drive attached, it can't have PCIe devices, it can't have a range of memory fitted. So because all these things can't be done, it doesn't need to check for them.

My thought process is that it takes a second or 2 to check each bootable drive, and as Unique said, his raid system slows things down a fair bit.

You should be able to disable checking for these things on every boot. It has been a while since I last built a system (a couple of years at least) but usually you can assign a specific boot drive, so it never check any of the others. If that assigned drive goes missing it just complains instead of trying to find another. I remember in days gone by that there was always a memory test on boot, this took a few seconds as it counted the memory up to the giddy heights of 128MB. That would take ages on modern systems, and was actually pointless, it wasn't doing any real integrity testing at all, just counting the cells available to it. The default was also to auto-check each drive attached to the system. Of course you could turn all this off, so it just remembered what it had last time. Check that things like boot priority and device initialisation aren't set to auto and that they are specified and saved.

[scotty0100]

you can save about 5 seconds by disabling GUI boot

Oo, thanks for that, just shaved some time off of my boot time as well!