Any experience with boot times Windows 7 x64 with Intel SSD X25-M G2?

I boot my system on about 25 seconds. And you have better crystal mark results than me.

Try switching to AHCI mode instead of IDE in BIOS. Although I think u need to reinstall win7 then to make it work properly.

I'm not the best qualified one to respond to Kaleido's "Although I think u need to reinstall win7 then to make it work properly" but wanted to try to nip this one in the bud.

You don't have to reinstall Win7 when you flip to AHCI.

I just did it here on a i750 on an Asus P7P55D. First, be sure to change the registry entry Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\msahci to start = 0.  Then reboot and in your BIOS change from IDE to AHCI. When you reboot Win7, you'll see it installing the proper drivers and you're good to go...

As I said, I'm no expert, but reading the forum, the above steps are those that are suggested.  And they worked for me on in Win7 (x64).

Note, though, that my boot times didn't change significantly when I made this change.  I think you've got something else going on that's slowing down your boot. For example, my boot times were slower until I disabled a few boot time functions (eSATA and ExpressGate...)

Message was edited by: tfield98

Boot times vary depending on where you're measuring it from, what things have to load in BIOS, cards installed, etc... Best is to measure it from the point after the BIOS load - It's the screen that pops up with all the IRQ assignments.  Your scores seem very in-line with most scores I've seen for the drive.

As for IDE vs. AHCI - I'd switch to AHCI mode.  If you google around you'll find a microsoft tech note on how to enable the AHCI driver from within the OS (msahci.sys) using the registry.  If you installed IDE then the AHCI driver is automatically disabled in the OS, the only caveat here is if you're using Intel chipset drivers you might need to enable the iaStor.sys and iaStorV.sys drivers instead.   You would do it the same way as you would the msahci driver by changing the same registry flag, but for those two.

Your CrystalDiskMark  numbers look fine however v2.2 will not show much if any perfomance difference between running in AHCI vs IDE mode.  What ACHI gives you is NCQ support and CDM v2.2 does not support queue depth greater than one.  The latest CrystalDiskMark v3.0 Beta has a new field for 4K random (QD=32) and this is where you should see a notable difference in scores between IDE and AHCI modes.

In regards to your actual boot time question I would agree you have something else most likely unrelated to your SSD that is causing the slow boot times.  I haven't timed my Win7 system but I would say it boots well under 30sec.

Switch to AHCI. It makes a big difference, because when you start W7 a lot of small files are loaded in parallel.Here is the result for my computer before and after I switched in W7 to AHCI:

IDE Mode

AHCI mode

The most important test is the 4K QD32. This tests reading a lot of small files in 32 parallel threads. 18 vs 160 MB/s makes a big difference and is caused by the command queing support that that AHCI has.

My computer currently takes 20-25 seconds to boot into my desktop (and for the hourglass to go away).

Here is my latest benchmark:

My computer takes longer than it should to startup as well.  I have an X25-m G2 80GB running win7 64.

Crystaldisk numbers look good, but takes atleast 30 secs to get from start of 'starting windows' screen to desktop.

Don't have much software installed, but have an external esata drive connected to my onboard sata ports via an external bracket, and 2 500gb 7200 hdds in raid 0.  Therefore my bios is set to raid rather than ahci.

If I were to get rid of my raid drives, and switch to ahci, is this likely to speed up my boot time?  I'm getting S.M.A.R.T warnings for the raid drives anyway, so might be time for them to go.

Or could it be the esata?  This certainly adds to my bios post time, but I'm more concerned about the actual windows loading time.

I have 32bit win 7 and I am booting in 25 sec from button on and windows itself 15 sec.

If you already installed W7 then you have to use the registry tweak that tfield98 mentioned above to switch to AHCI. After the registry change you can change the SATA setting in your BIOS to AHCI. Out of personal experience I can tell you that W7 will crash after startup if you forget the registry tweak. Here's the Microsoft link:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

Also you don't need the Intel drivers. I never touched the standard windows 7 drivers and am happily running in AHCI mode. Just search the forum there are a few guides on how to switch to AHCI. But doing the registry change and then switching to AHCI in BIOS is basicly it.

Last but not least:power-on time consists of BIOS loading and Windows loading. If your BIOS takes 30 seconds until it begins loading Windows the fastest drive will not help you a lot. Often the BIOS has options to make BIOS loading faster. For me it helped to disable onboard IDE  (which was run by an additional Marvel? chip) and other stuff I did not use, it all shaves a few seconds of the power-on time.

I have 2x80gb x25-m with latest firmware in RAID-0

number crystalmark are

500-160

320-160

24-68

boot window7 in 22/23 sec (my antivirus bitdefender slow it down a lil)

my problem is more on the closing seem to take too long to turn off but oh well...

The only reason I mentioned the Intel drivers is that my system had them already installed.   What happened is when I installed my 2x160GB drives and did the registry hack for MSAHCI and rebooted, set the AHCI on in BIOS, and went to boot the OS the system would BSOD.   I tried a couple different configurations and no matter what MSAHCI wasn't loading.   I went in and used the same method for msahci on the iaStor and iaStorV drivers and the system booted right in.

I am running a pair of X25-M G2 160's in RAID0 @ 503 MB/sec seq read.  Using a stop watch - from the moment I click Start Windows 7 from my static BootIT bootmanager window (which really marks a solid Windows launch point), I get 25 seconds all the way through no hourglass with or without my startup items (using msconfig) enabled or disabled.  Shutdown takes 8 seconds.

i think normal starting time should be set between 20 and 25 but as i said some device like antivirus can slow down the effective start (when your cursor turn finally to arrow)

on the other hand my closing time can get 20/30 sec but i have a ram-disk and i make him save Disk Image on shoot down i am sure that count