Your Z820 or Z800 SSD boot time?

[dv411]

May I ask all willing Z-series users that have SSDs installed as their boot drives, to post their boot and shutdown times?

Or, if your boot time (cold to Windows login prompt) is under a minute, post it anyway, with your system details:

- HP model

- CPU(s), RAM, graphics card

- boot drive make and model (e.g. Intel 520 series 480GB SSD)

- OS

- deviations from default settings (e.g. SAS and NIC Option ROMs disabled; Windows services disabled, etc.)

The reason I ask for this is because a super-fast Z820 with a super-fast SSD is still posting pretty long boot times of over a minute where some laptops with conventional drives boot from cold in under 40 seconds.  (Yes I do know Z820 is a system a bit more complex than a laptop - but it's also much faster.)  So if anyone has a Z820 booting faster than in a minute, I'd love to know what is its configuration and if there was any magic sauce applied.

Here are some that I've tested:

HP Z820 B2C08UT, dual E5-2670 Xeons, 64GB RAM, Quadro K5000, Intel 520 series 480GB SSD on SATA 6G (Firmware 400i) boot drive, Win7 Pro 64-bit, NIC and SAS Option ROM disabled, Intel RSTe 3.5 installed:

- 1:01 - 1:06 - boot, cold to windows login prompt. "Starting Windows" - at 0:15-0:17

- 5-8 seconds - shutdown.

HP Z820 (dual E5-2650 Xeons, 64GB RAM, GTX-680 4GB Graphics, one Samsung 840 Pro 256GB SSD (boot/OS), two Samsung 840 Pro 512GB SSDs for CS6 functions, two HGST 3TB Ultrastars in RAID0 (media volume, Windows striping)):
- 1:41 - 1:43 - cold to Windows login prompt
- 0:11 - 0:18 - shutdown

HP Z800 (dual W5590 3.3GHz Xeons, 12GB Ram, Quadro FX580, Samsung 840 Pro 512GB SSD (boot/OS), one Western Digital 2TB drive RE4 7200RPM (media), one WD Velociraptor 300GB drive (backup OS), Windows 7 Professional 64 bit)
- 1:25 to login screen (+/- 1 second).  "Starting Windows" at 0:33
- 0:18 shutdown (+/-1 seconds)

To put this into perspective, a Z820 with a mechanical boot drive:

HP Z820 (B2C03UT, one Xeon E5-2630 CPU, 32GB DDR3-1600 RAM running at 1333MHz, 500GB 7200rpm boot drive on SATA 6G):
- 1:57 (cold to "welcome" screen; HP Logo at 0:16, "Starting Windows” at 0:45)
- 0:29 shutdown

Thanks for any ideas and boot times!

[SDH]

Alex

A blast from the past.... here's what my tuned up xw6600 is doing.  Not sure you want anything from the older workstations, but maybe some pearls in here for you.  I do pretty much the same for the xw6400's etc., and get about the same results with similar builds.

Cold to W7Pro64 logon prompt:  38.5 seconds

Shutdown click to cold off:  6.5 seconds

Boot order:

Intel SSDSA2M160G2 II drive

Seagate 250 GB docs SATA II drive

Integraged IDE

Only then Optical, and all the other options are F5 grayed out

Power On options in BIOS:

Only F9 and F10 displayed

Post delay of 0

Device Options in BIOS:

NIC PXE disabled (SATA has to stay on)

SATA emulation:  "RAID + AHCI" obviousy

I had this boot SSD initially loaded by accident without the small "system reserved" partition, and then the rest as a second partition.  Things seem faster in all ways after recognizing that issue, and reformat, and then clean install from scratch.  You can easily see if you have two partitions or one on your boot SSD via Device Manager/Disk Management.  I posted recently how to get the 2 to be created, every time.  Painful to start over, of course.

Loaded the universal 64-bit W7Pro HP service packs for on board network and audio chips.... they work fine on the xw6400 and xw6600's (harvested from the Z600 HP drivers site).

RAM:  4x2GB HP sticker official workstation/server ram (398707-051 or 398707-551).

Graphics:  HP nVidia FX3700 with latest HP firmware flashed.  I get 6.8/6.8 Windows Experience Index scores from that, and get 6.9/6.9 if I put in a FX3800.  I use the default install settings and the latest default drivers from nVidia web site for the cards.... ODE on the dropdown there is the default.

Processors:  2x E5450 quad cores, SLBBM sSpec code each.

Attached is the WEI score page.... it's a quick and handy way to look at relative performance for us.

Scott

[DriesV]

Hi,

Z820 with dual E5-2680 and Intel SSD 520 240GB as boot drive on LSI 2308 controller.

Also boot times of well over 1 minute. Seems normal. 🙂

Dries

[lms-eng]

I did some tests on this and found the LSI driver takes around 30-40 seconds to load, no idea what the thing is doing to take that long. As a test I disabled the on-board LSI and tried an adaptec controller, and the windows boot time was reduced by around 30 seconds. I aslo found the read/write speed of the LSI controller appalling, the onboard intel controller was quicker!

[dv411]

---

@Scott D. Harrison wrote:

Cold to W7Pro64 logon prompt:  38.5 seconds

Shutdown click to cold off:  6.5 seconds

Boot order:

Intel SSDSA2M160G2 II drive

Thanks Scott, this is really fast.  What is your cold-to-"Starting Windows" time?

[dv411]

---

@DriesV wrote:

Z820 with dual E5-2680 and Intel SSD 520 240GB as boot drive on LSI 2308 controller.

Also boot times of well over 1 minute. Seems normal. 🙂

---

Thanks Dries.  Have you tried putting that SSD on the SATA 6G port and disabling SAS Option ROM Download along with Network/PXE one?

[dv411]

---

@lms-eng wrote:

I did some tests on this and found the LSI driver takes around 30-40 seconds to load, no idea what the thing is doing to take that long. As a test I disabled the on-board LSI and tried an adaptec controller, and the windows boot time was reduced by around 30 seconds.

---

30-40 seconds to load in Windows or in the pre-Windows boot sequence?

During pre-Windows boot, you can watch what's happening on the screen - it's 5-7 seconds for the controller initialization, and then however long it takes to initialize / scan attached devices.  If your boot device(s) is/are on the SATA controller, you can disable SAS Option ROM download in BIOS - SAS devices will still work in Windows; boot time will get shorter.

[SDH]

Alex,

On that xw6600 the cold-to-"Starting Windows" is 24 seconds on each test.  That is to the point when "Starting Windows" first shows up on the monitor.

I have attached the replicated setup file for that workstation's BIOS settings for reference.

Scott

[lms-eng]

I was just talking about 1 single driver loading in windows. If you don't need the LSI controller, the only way to disable and reduce the boot time is to set the device as Hidden in security settings in the bios.

[dv411]

---

@Scott D. Harrison wrote:

On that xw6600 the cold-to-"Starting Windows" is 24 seconds on each test.  That is to the point when "Starting Windows" first shows up on the monitor.

---

On a clean fresh Z820 with SAS and NIC boot agents disabled, that time is 15-17 seconds. Z800 - 33 seconds.  Yet overall, Z800 and Z820 boot much longer - 1:05 to 2 minutes.  Your Windows start up time of about 14 seconds is nothing short of amazing.

I have attached the replicated setup file for that workstation's BIOS settings for reference.

Thanks - not sure how it's going to help as the systems I work with are Z820 and Z800.