On 10/04/2018 13:44, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
Martin Brown wrote:
It has got an SSD. Can't say it is noticeably faster.

Something is wrong if it isn't at least a factor of 2 faster and
normally nearly an order of magnitude faster (depending on how extensive
your default power up BIOS checks are). Some BIOSes these days offer a
save working ram image to SSD option during controlled shutdown so that
you can quite literally restart from exactly where you were before.

My SSD practically maxes out a 6G SATA link whereas my spinning rust
disk barely scrapes past 10% of the bandwidth of a 3G SATA.

Well, with my laptop when I first got it (thanks Mr Rumm) and fitted the
SSD, it was extremely fast to boot. But with normal use and all the
Windows updates it has slowed down considerably.

Things like additional programs loaded at startup can have quite an
effect. If you run "autoruns" from live.sysinternals.com you can see
exactly what is being loaded...

Things like virus scanners can have a big hit on boot performance.

This workshop PC is a lot older, but running the same OS. Processor is an
Athlon 64 3500+ 2.21GHz. And can't say the boot time improved noticeably
when fitting the SSD. Although it has another HD too, with XP on it.

There are several components of boot time, including how long it takes
to get through the various BIOS initialisation stages before it even
gets to start loading stuff from disk. Some older machines can be quite
slow there (especially if they have other hardware that needs
initialisation - like one of my machines that probably adds 10 secs just
doing the SCSI init and bus scan).

CPU performance will also have an effect on booting times, since a
windows boot will load lots of separate executable images that need to
initialise and run. On a modern processor the boot will be mainly IO
bound, but on older ones, the lack of processor oomph becomes far more
noticeable - SSD upgrades will often then just shift you a little
further along the road to the next bottleneck.

Lastly WinXP can have a number of issues on SSD drives. Not supporting
the trim command can mean progressively slower write operations
(although that should not effect boot too much).

Also the XP disk preparation routines did not align partitions to suit
drives with 4K sectors. That's bad news for modern drives of all types
since they are then forced to do a read / modify / write cycles on two
sectors for every single sector written by the OS creating a "write
amplification" effect. That's another big performance hit on writes, and
a smaller one on reads (mostly on random reads). Its also an additional
problem on SSDs since it burns though the flash page write cycle limit
more quickly, and gives the drive's wear levelling algorithm more to do.
(having said that the write cycle limit on modern SSDs is pretty high -
so you will be hard pushed to actually wear out a SSD).



--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/