My Z97 now takes five minutes to fully boot to Windows 10.
I've just booted up Windows 10 Pro in an Intel i7-4770K system on a Gigabyte GA-Z97-D3H mobo with a CT1000P3SSD8 M.2 NVMe drive. The 1TB M.2 SSD is overkill on this machine, but for some reason the drive wasn't recognised on my 7950X system. N.B. I don't have Windows Fast Startup enabled on any of my desktop systems, which would probably improve startup times.
The time to reach Windows desktop was 85 seconds, but this included a wait of 10s for the LSI SAS controller BIOS message to go away, plus another 5s for me to enter my password at the Windows login prompt. If we subtract 10 + 5s from 85s we get 70s for a more typical machine with no SAS controller or login prompt nonsense. It takes another 30s for umpteen other things to load (Hard Disk Sentinel is especially slow checking multiple drives), but we're still talking less than 2 minutes for everything to load. The i7-4770K has a mild all-core overclock of 41x (Aida64 reports 4,021MHz). I have another i7-4770K running stock (no overclock) but I can't be bothered to fire it up right now.
It should be noted my Z97 board uses only two of the four PCIe channels in my NVMe drive, but it still benchmarks faster than a separate Windows 10 boot drive on a 2.5" laptop style SATA SSD. If memory serves me right, the two channels on the M.2 NVMe drive give roughly 800MB/s and the SATA drive just over 500MB/s in ATTO and Crystal Disk.
I'm running 4 x 4GB Crucial RAM (16GB total) at 1600MT/s on the overclocked i7-4770K. The other non-overclocked i7-4770K has 2 x 8GB Kingston DIMMs (16GB) at 2133MT/s. Outside of benchmarking, it's difficult to tell the difference between the two systems in terms of responsiveness. The overclocked CPU probably masks the slower RAM speed.
I have newer systems with 32GB and three machines with 64GB. Most of the time 16GB is more than enough for my needs, but when running Hyper-V Virtual Machines or 4k/UHD video renders, the extra memory is advantageous.
Dare I suggest trying a cheap DRAM-less M.2 NVMe drive of at least 480GB capacity? Better still get a more expensive drive with DRAM cache. Disconnect all other drives for safety's sake and install a fresh copy of Windows 10 on the M.2 drive. It takes me less than 15 minutes to install Windows 10 on an SSD in an old PC. Check how long it takes to boot to a clean install of Windows 10, then install some/all of your favourite programs and re-check the boot time. Let us know what happens.
If you want to experiment further, wipe the new SSD, reconnect your old SSHD boot drive(s) (are they in RAID?) and "clone" Windows 10 to the new SSD. Disconnect the SSHDs and any other hard disks before booting from the new SSD. THIS IS MOST IMPORTANT. It stops Windows from sometimes marking the old drive as the boot partition for the cloned Windows C: drive on the new SSD. You can reconnect all your old drives later.
https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree
Note: SSDs transfer rates usually get faster as you move up from 120GB to 240GB, then to 480GB and finally 980GB. Each doubling of capacity often doubles the number of RAM chips and hence parallel channels, but this may not be true in all cases. More channels = faster transfer rates. You may not need a 1TB SSD, but it should be significantly faster than an equivalent 120GB SSD of the same type.
Looking at this review of a Seagate SSHD, it claims Windows 7 SSHD boot times are 35% faster (compared to booting from 5400RPM HDD) or 25% faster than a 7200RPM HDD. A 25% or 35% improvement in Windows startup is not what I call a huge difference.
https://www.storagereview.com/review/seagate-laptop-sshd-1tb-review
Performance Versus 2.5-in. 5400-RPM/7200-RPM HDD:
- Windows 7 Boot Time: 35% Faster/25% Faster
- Applications Load Test: 450% Faster/300% Faster
- Game Load Test: 140% Faster/50% Faster
Whilst I accept that data in the SSHD's cache will improve performance, transfer rates from the main HDD section of the Seagate are somewhat pedestrian, compared with modern hard drives. I have a couple of 8TB Toshiba hard disks where the transfer rate starts out at 250MB/s at the outer edge of the platters, reducing gradually to 120MB/s for the innermost cylinders. Your 1TB SSHDs seem to be hovering around the 100MB/s mark.
The 1TB Seagate SSHD review reaches the following conclusions:
When looking closer at its performance, the 1TB Seagate Laptop offered somewhat expected results. In our synthetic benchmarks which measure performance outside of cache, the drive posted 99.37MB/s read and 99.54MB/s write during the 2MB sequential tests. Both speeds were slower than the previous 750GB Seagate model, which posted reads and writes of 104.90MB/s and 103.67MB/s, respectively. Our 2MB and 4K random workloads told a similar story, placing the 1TB Seagate drive at the bottom of the pack. However, its performance picked up significantly when we put it through our real-world consumer benchmarks which show the advantage of cache technologies, which was highlighted by our gaming trace results. In this scenario, the 1TB Seagate Laptop SSHD boasted an impressive 1,498.08 IOPS, 80.36MB/s, and an average latency of 5.282ms; all of which were well above the other comparables. Though there wasn’t as much disparity between the results of the tested consumer SSHDs, our HTPC workloads showed the 1TB Seagate on top as well.
I don't know what programs or games you run, but if they involve loading vast amounts of data (Gigabytes) after switch on. they could flush part of the Windows Operating System out of the cache buffer (8GB?) so boot times might suffer.
If you're concerned about the longevity of SSDs, look for one with a high TBW (Tera Bytes Written) rating. Some (expensive) Enterprise class SSDs allow you to fill an SSD from blank every day (erasing at night, then filling again the next day). They tend to be used as short term cache (e.g. L2ARC/SLOG) in large storage arrays. You can continue to fill and erase such drives ad infinitum until the 5 year warranty expires. Consumer grade SSDs have lower TBW figures, especially QLC DRAM-less designs, but you might never wear one out, even with regular writes.
https://www.howtogeek.com/806926/what-does-tbw-mean-for-ssds/
Before buying, please note that M.2 drives are available in (faster) NVMe or (slower) SATA versions. SATA was more common back in the early days, but modern M.2 drives and motherboards are usually NVMe. At first glance the difference between NVMe and SATA is not always obvious, but you may be able to tell by checking the keyways (notches) on the end of the drive itself and the socket on the motherboard. They must match otherwise you might not be able to plug the drive in.
Some motherboards will work fine with both SATA and NVMe M.2 drives. Other motherboards might only work with SATA, or only with NVMe, in a specific socket. My Crucial P3 1TB CT1000P2SSD8 M.2 drive is NVMe, not SATA, but it runs fine on my Gigabyte Z97 mobo (albeit in slower 2-channel mode, not the faster 4-channel mode). The Crucial P3 M.2 NVMe is faster than my 2.5" laptop style SATA SSD, but in the real world, there's not much apparent difference between 800MB/s (M.2) and 500MB/s (SATA).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2
Yes, let's.
