BOOT TIMES

It only seems like yesterday that I would hit the switch on my BitFenix Shinobi, make a run for the throne, grab a drink, and head back to my room at varsity, waiting for my system to boot into life. An SSD was the solution to those waits. It annexed the ancient hard drive, enabling booting from UEFI to login screen in less time than it takes to identify the console gamer in the room (about 10 seconds).

Things have improved drastically since those first SSDs. PCIe SSDs are now available to the masses, which, on paper, should be far faster than any SSD from days past. The latest budget 250GB Samsung Evo 960 comes with sequential reads of 3,200MB/s—six times faster than the height of SSD power, with reads being the key factor when looking at boot times. However, in my experience, it doesn’t correlate well when it comes to boot times.

As the motherboard takes time to identify the PCIe drive as a bootable device, it can take 20–60 seconds for a PCIe system to boot. The obvious benefit is when you’re on desktop, with near instantaneous program loading and super-fast file transfers, but it’s still sluggish from power-on to login. RAID solutions don’t help, because the system cycles through the necessary prompts to allow you to enter the RAID UEFI setup each bootup as well, further increasing load times. So, the answer? Well, it sounds ridiculous, but if you’re just after a quick booting system, and aren’t really a professional just yet, the SSD still might be the best choice for you.