HP laptop boot time not improved after installing SSD and with HDD as storage

[SuperJhari]

Hello,

I have upgraded my laptop to include SSD which runs with PCIe interface and gives me 1.6GBPS R/W speeds on benchmark tests. My OS was earlier installed on the stock HDD and I migrated it to SSD. Even though my laptop performs much better after booting but what's disappointing is my boot time has not improved and takes 30-40 sec to fully load to my desktop. Is it that my laptop is waiting for HDD to spin up before loading? I haven't tried removing HDD and boot as I don't want to mess up with hardware. My SSD is BASIC with GPT partition and HDD is Dynamic with MBR. Could this also cause conflict?

Thanks for your help!

[WAWood]

@SuperJhari 

I have PCs that mix GPT with MBR and that does no pose any booting issues.

My suggestion is that you disconnect the HDD and see if that makes a difference.  If it does, then Windows is likely indexing the HDD as part of the boot process and that is slowing down the whole boot.

[SuperJhari]

Hi @WAWood Thanks for your reply.  Based on your inputs I tried the below steps but nothing helped:

1. Disabled indexing in each drive and disabled search services altogether.

2. Disabled HDD and CD ROM drive from device manager (not physically though) and ensured it is not showing in Disk Management.

3. Clean boot Windows 10 disabling all services from System Configuration Boot Menu.

However none worked and boot time is still at 40 sec. Please suggest your feedback.

Thanks!

[WAWood]

@SuperJhari 

If you have disconnected the HDD and the boot is still very long, then the most likely issue is that you are loading a lot of stuff at startup.

You need to go into SAFE mode and see if that makes a difference:  https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/12376/windows-10-start-your-pc-in-safe-mode

[SuperJhari]

Yes booting to SAFE mode and the boot time indeed drastically reduced to 18 sec (I expected <10sec for PCIe NVM SSD). However I always have kept minimal options at startup and I have attached the image.

The only change I did to my laptop apart from installing SSD was to add 8GB RAM in addition to stock 4 GB RAM and is running in dual channel mode.

I am running 3rd party antivirus too. Would this also be causing slow boot?

Thanks!