boot time with nvme and sata ssd: is there a significant difference?

[AntonioP]

I'm planning to buy a new pc and one thing I really hate is that I have to wait forever for the hard disk to boot, so since I will obviously buy a ssd I'd like to know what kind of difference I should expect between a nvme and a sata ssd in boot time. For what I've seen right now I have the impression that I could spare a bit of money and that nvme aren't really worth the cost, but I'd like to hear more informed opinions.

[Slottr]

There isn't a significant difference, I'd just get whichever of the two is cheaper

[Princess Luna]

Not really as long as you buy a good sata3 SSD in the first place.

[akio123008]

No difference in boot time at all. Especially since windows 8 and 10 use Fast Boot mode, meaning even on HDD based machines they can boot relatively fast, because resources are preloaded in a way that could be compared to waking up a computer from sleep mode.

[acv159357n]

i went from a 850evo to a 960 evo, and there is a clear difference. it went from 12 seconds to about 7, including bios boot-up. its up to you if you find it worth it. i have my os and programs on the 960, frequently used games on a 500GB 850 evo, and the rest on 2 2tb seagate drives in raid 0.

[akio123008]

1 minute ago, acv159357n said:

i went from a 850evo to a 960 evo, and there is a clear difference. it went from 12 seconds to about 7, including bios boot-up. its up to you if you find it worth it. i have my os and programs on the 960, frequently used games on a 500GB 850 evo, and the rest on 2 2tb seagate drives in raid 0.

On windows 10? It's an impressive difference. I'd expect something like this on windows 7.

[acv159357n]

Just now, akio123008 said:

On windows 10? It's an impressive difference. I'd expect something like this on windows 7.

on a clean windows 10 install you should not expect these differances indeed, but i let MANY programs launch at boot, steam, battle.net, origin, email, ect ect. that is also a reason i have 32GB of ram

[akio123008]

I just rebooted my own computer to see how long a boot would take, and including the POST screen it's about 9 seconds. On my sata ssd.

[akio123008]

Just now, acv159357n said:

on a clean windows 10 install you should not expect these differances indeed, but i let MANY programs launch at boot, steam, battle.net, origin, email, ect ect. that is also a reason i have 32GB of ram

Right that is a valid thing to bring up, a very fast SSD could make a difference when loading a massive load of things, The difference isn't going to be as huge as going from a hard drive to an ssd for the first time though.

[WereCat]

Not really.

NVME is good for transfering large files (like video files for example) as it has really fast sequential write/read speeds but the random 4K read/writes are barely any better than on a SATA drives and those are what determines the responsivenes and loading times, boot times.

Good SATA drives have around 40-50MB/s random 4k write/read while most NVME drives sit around 50-70MB/s.

 

What would make a difference is Optane as it has MUCH faster random read/write speeds than NVME. Still, you would not see that big improvement in boot times anyways.

[Mira Yurizaki]

If I were to boot up Windows and see what's going on in Task Manager, I would see that only about 1.7GB of memory is used. Assuming this is all application data, then an SSD could literally transfer everything over in less than 5 seconds. But I still have an OS "boot" time of 10-15 seconds despite being on an NVMe drive (so the loading time would be less than a second). What gives?

 

Because the OS booting process is more involved than just shoving data from storage to RAM and calling it a day. For example on Linux, you can have it output what it's doing on boot:

(image from https://linuxgazette.net/156/prestia.html)

 

These daemon processes aren't all that large so it shouldn't take very long to load them, but some of them still take time to complete. When it comes to booting an OS, storage performance helps, but your hardware, system software, and how they play with each other still plays a large role.

[Zeeus]

On 8/23/2018 at 11:45 AM, AntonioP said:

I'm planning to buy a new pc and one thing I really hate is that I have to wait forever for the hard disk to boot, so since I will obviously buy a ssd I'd like to know what kind of difference I should expect between a nvme and a sata ssd in boot time. For what I've seen right now I have the impression that I could spare a bit of money and that nvme aren't really worth the cost, but I'd like to hear more informed opinions.

In my personal experience it has made a SIGNIFICANT difference. I know online it says it doesn't make a difference and maybe it's my specific set up. I used to boot off even a raid SSD config and a normal SSD which was a Samsung 850 500gb. Both were similar boot times. 

 

I got a new nvme m.2 drive which I installed Windows on and Holy shit my computer loads up all the way in about 4 seconds and I've changed nothing else. Compared to over 10 seconds with the sata 3 SSDs. So I guess you're mileage may vary. I run a mini itx z390 mobo btw. 

[Mick Naughty]

I thought it would be faster too but it’s the same. If anything it’s slower now. But just a tad.