Slower than normal M.2?

[Tosa]

While I certainly don't have to go make some food or something while I wait for my computer to boot, I find it strange that it doesn't boot even faster with my Samsung 960 EVO. It seems the upgrade from 840 EVO wasn't all that significant.

I didn't really think of it, until I installed a virtual machine in VirtualBox, using the M.2 drive for storing the virtual harddrive, and the virtual machine would reboot in just 12 seconds. For comparison, my physical computer takes 42 seconds to reboot. Nearly half that time is spent shutting Windows down (19 seconds), and that's not far from twice the time the VM needed to shut down and boot up again. And yes, I do have the Samsung M.2 driver installed.

 

Only thing I found searching for a solution was people booting in 15 seconds using similar hardware (Ryzen 7).

 

My specs are:

• AMD Ryzen 5 1600X
• HyperX Fury DDR4 2133MHz 16GB
• ASUS ROG Strix B530-F Gaming
• ASUS GeForce GTX 1080 ROG Strix Gaming
• Samsung 960 EVO 500GB M.2 PCIe SSD (boot drive)
• Samsung SSD 840 EVO 120GB (old boot drive, still use it for storage)
• Seagate Barracuda 2TB 3.5'' HDD (storage)

 

[Tosa]

Here's the VM rebooting:

 

[Oshino Shinobu]

NVMe doesn't really provide any benefit for booting, so I wouldn't expect it to be much, or any faster than your 840 EVO. 

 

Background processes (for shutting down), startup programs and such all contribute to boot times. It will often get slower over time as more stuff is loaded with the OS. Also, if you're counting some boot times from the moment you turn the PC on, then you're actually counting POST and boot times. POST times aren't reliant on your storage speed, so aren't really part of your boot time. 

[AnalogCanavity]

For me, the 960 evo on my ASUS Z270-H automatically is set to SATA mode. Go into BIOS and set the speed to PCIe 4x. It will disable a SATA port, it will tell you which one in the motherboard manual.

[Tosa]

18 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

NVMe doesn't really provide any benefit for booting, so I wouldn't expect it to be much, or any faster than your 840 EVO. 

I'll check how fast a VM boots of the SATA SSD, then. Though, I'd think the increased IOPS should make a significant difference, unless it's the CPU bottlenecking.

 

19 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

Background processes (for shutting down), startup programs and such all contribute to boot times. It will often get slower over time as more stuff is loaded with the OS.

Maybe, but it adds like 30 seconds compared to the VM. And I'm not exactly installing every piece of software I stumble across on the internet. Though I've noticed that GeForce Experience and the Nvidia drivers comes with a bunch of services running in the background.

 

23 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

Also, if you're counting some boot times from the moment you turn the PC on, then you're actually counting POST and boot times

I know. The VMs post time is included as well, but the VM's hypervisor doesn't have as many tests to run as the physical machine's firmware. Still, the POSTing doesn't contribute a whole lot to the boot time.

 

22 minutes ago, Zic05 said:

For me, the 960 evo on my ASUS Z270-H automatically is set to SATA mode. Go into BIOS and set the speed to PCIe 4x. It will disable a SATA port, it will tell you which one in the motherboard manual.

Well, Samsung Magician says it's running on "PCIe Gen. 3 x 4". I also get way better speeds when benchmarking compared to what SATA is capable of.

[3 Lions]

You may need to convert it to GPT

[Tosa]

2 minutes ago, LinusTechTipsFanFromDarlo said:

You may need to convert it to GPT

I don't believe it's possible to boot from M.2 NVMe drives with MBR style formatting.

Also, it's already GPT:

[AnalogCanavity]

1 hour ago, Tosa said:

Well, Samsung Magician says it's running on "PCIe Gen. 3 x 4". I also get way better speeds when benchmarking compared to what SATA is capable of.

It’s nkt that hard to go into BIOS and check, just do it. If it still not fast maybe RMA it

[Tosa]

Installed a VM on my SATA SSD and did the same test as on the M.2 NVMe SSD. It took the exact same amount of time to reboot as the NVMe drive. So that's interesting.