Windows 10 boot times

[Reiley360]

I was looking around after building my PC, and I found a bunch of tests saying that an SSD is generally 20-40 times faster while booting Windows. Now I've only had my PC running for about a week, but it boots Windows 10 in about 10 seconds using a WD 7200 HDD. Is this supposed to be normal? (I've downloaded quite a bit of stuff as well, so it's not just a factor of available space....that I know of) I'm also curious to see what others boot times are like with Windows 10, so feel free to post your storage device, HDD or SSD, and the boot times. Thanks.

 

[ArtPog]

You're one of the lucky ones who the Good HDD Fairy has touched. That is if you're REALLY able to boot to your Desktop in a Windows OS with all your devices, programs, applications loaded within 10 (as in TEN) seconds or so using your HDD as your boot drive and you're now able & ready to utilize your PC in a practical sense within that 10 seconds (or so) period.

I'd like to have a $ for every user from whom I've heard (more or less) the same "boot tale". Alas, when we personally have an opportunity to observe this fantastic boot speed scenario we learn to our gross disappointment it simply ain't so. The user has clocked the time from pressing the PC's power-on switch to some BIOS screen or motherboard logo or more usually where the system has actually reached the Desktop, but is continuing to load the OS and the devices, programs, applications.

As a practical matter overall boot time is the interval from powering-on the PC up to the time you, the user, can begin accessing & working with all your data.

Anyway, if you actually have been touched by the Good HDD Fairy, count your blessings and continue to play the lottery.

 

[jankerson]

Yeah, more like 5 to 8 mins for complete start up waiting for everything to load with a standard 7200 rpm HD.

Now yeah with an M.2 SSD in PCIe mode it's more like 30 seconds or so.

Mine with a Samsung M.2 960 EVO is like 30 secs from the time I hit the power button to Windows 10 fully up and loaded. And I don't have fast boot enabled in the bios, never really liked using that option.

From the bois it's under 15 secs until Windows is fully up and loaded.

 

[USAFRet]

When people talk about "boot time", there is no single standard of what they are measuring.
There are several stopping points where people want to measure from

T0 - Pressing the power button
T1 - When the BIOS stops doing its thing. This may be from 0.5 sec to 20sec. Fastboot, etc, etc
T2 - Appearance of the Windows login screen
T3 - Appearance of the Windows desktop
T4 - When the system is up enough for you, the user, to start interacting with things. This is majorly impacted by whatever software and networking doodads are in the startup.
T5 - When the drive stops thrashing and loading things

Then we add in factors like hibernation, etc, and the lines are muddied again.

Any time comparison must be done with the same parameters.
My system at home (500GB SSD) cold boots to a fully usable state on 25-30 secs. 1/2 of that is the BIOS.
My system at work (2TB HDD laptop) doesn't stop thrashing the drive for about 20 minutes. That is not merely SSD vs HDD.

 

[jankerson]

Yeah I use T5 as my measurement personally.

All that matters to me is they boot a lot faster than my 7200 rpm drives ever did on both my machines.

M.2 SSD on one and SATA SSD on the other older machine.

The boot time went down to almost nothing on my older machine (1st gen i7) when I put in the Sandisk 240GB SATA SSD. Was like 8-9 mins before and down to well under 1 min after. That's from hitting the power button to when the HD stopped loading things etc.

 

[Reiley360]

Hey everyone, not sure if you'll all see this, but I've been thinking of recording the PC from power on to the "login" of Windows just for further proof so if you're interested I'll make an unlisted YouTube video or something! I find it a bit odd as well, as my friend has an SSD in his, but it's much slower than my HDD... weird, but I guess everything can have defects, even positive ones (if that even makes sense)

 

[jankerson]

Just to the login screen doesn't really count, things like fast boot enabled in BIOS etc can make a large difference.

It's from power on to Windows all the way up and running (logged in and HD finished loading programs etc) that counts as far as boot time.

My M.2 SSD takes under 30 secs from power button to fully loaded, that's logged in and all startup programs loaded etc.

 

[Reiley360]

I know, in about 10 seconds I'm into the login, (and since steam takes a while to boot anyway) I can usually get into the main menu of PUBG after about 40 seconds, but I can definitely use my PC after about 15-20 seconds.