"SSDs are not the magic bullet that some would have you believe"

I'm the latest example of switching to an SSD. In the past I was using the LR1,2,3,4 with 5400k rpm drives, 7200k, and finally the 10k RPM VelociRaptor. Well, with my new laptop, I finally decided to upgrade the HD and find out more about the SSD's that people talk about. The performance boost with an equal RAM is just unbelievable. Obviously my processor got upgraded. But man, when I took out that Samsung 1Tb 5400rpm drive and put in a Samsung 840 256Gb SSD the performance boost was just crazy out of the box. I'm now running a trial Lightroom 5 beta and love every bit of it. My files are opening up faster, I can see previews faster, something I always missed with a lagging mechanical drive.
To make the long story short - once you use SSD, there's no going back. But make sure it's a quality one to ensure the pleasant first experience

bikfoto wrote in post #15835507
I'm the latest example of switching to an SSD. In the past I was using the LR1,2,3,4 with 5400k rpm drives, 7200k, and finally the 10k RPM VelociRaptor. Well, with my new laptop, I finally decided to upgrade the HD and find out more about the SSD's that people talk about. The performance boost with an equal RAM is just unbelievable. Obviously my processor got upgraded. But man, when I took out that Samsung 1Tb 5400rpm drive and put in a Samsung 840 256Gb SSD the performance boost was just crazy out of the box. I'm now running a trial Lightroom 5 beta and love every bit of it. My files are opening up faster, I can see previews faster, something I always missed with a lagging mechanical drive.
To make the long story short - once you use SSD, there's no going back. But make sure it's a quality one to ensure the pleasant first experience

What was your old laptop and how did you use a velociraptor in it?

I've used VelociRaptor on a i7 920 OC'd desktop actually, and the boot times were terrible.

bikfoto wrote in post #15838904
I've used VelociRaptor on a i7 920 OC'd desktop actually, and the boot times were terrible.

OK. BTW, did you update to Win7 at the same time?

You still dodged the question of what your old notebook was hardware wise. If you upgrade an old Core2 to an i5 or i7 with DDR3 and all new onboard chips that's gotta make a difference.

I upgraded my 160 GB HDD to a 120 GB Sandisk Extreme SSD on my Core 2 Duo which runs at 2 GHz. It now boots in under 45 seconds. Before it took minutes before it was ready.

If I leave my external hard drive (a WD My Book Essential 1 TB plugged into a PCIe USB 3 card) on and connected, the boot times increase dramatically (at least double). When the same drive is plugged into a USB 2 port, no increase in boot times, but then the drive is slow. So I leave it plugged into the USB 3 card but the power adapter is unplugged until I need it.

Running Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit. My hard drives being SATA I and II weren't that fast to begin with.

Lightroom 3.6 is nice and quick. Rendering previews still takes the same amount of time as it did before, being processor dependent. I installed Lightroom 4 and it was slow so I took it off. It will have to go back on when I get my new 6D.

uOpt wrote in post #15839718
OK. BTW, did you update to Win7 at the same time?

You still dodged the question of what your old notebook was hardware wise. If you upgrade an old Core2 to an i5 or i7 with DDR3 and all new onboard chips that's gotta make a difference.

For the laptop I've tried it on Asus U59 with Core i5 2nd gen. Also I've put in a Samsung 840 into my Lenovo Z580 with i7 3rd. And I've even replaced my desktop velociraptor.

Swann1 wrote in post #15840146
I upgraded my 160 GB HDD to a 120 GB Sandisk Extreme SSD on my Core 2 Duo which runs at 2 GHz. It now boots in under 45 seconds. Before it took minutes before it was ready.

Something wrong here it's never taken even my old Core 2 Duo more then 30 seconds with a mechanical drive. There is no reason for any modern day computer (unless you run Vista which takes a year to load) to take more then 60 seconds and that's still pretty sluggish. My guess is your system is doing a bunch of checks before loading windows which is making it take longer then it needs to be. See if you can possibly disable the bios checks and I bet that would cut your startup time in half.

isoMorphic wrote in post #15855448
Something wrong here it's never taken even my old Core 2 Duo more then 30 seconds with a mechanical drive. There is no reason for any modern day computer (unless you run Vista which takes a year to load) to take more then 60 seconds and that's still pretty sluggish. My guess is your system is doing a bunch of checks before loading windows which is making it take longer then it needs to be. See if you can possibly disable the bios checks and I bet that would cut your startup time in half.

Swann1 probably has a crapload of stuff installed on his or her system, presumably not all wanted. If somebody wants to solve that problem by going all SSD that's fine. I just don't like it when it is used as a recommendation to others, especially when the details of what was compared to what are so fuzzy.

uOpt wrote in post #15855454
Swann1 probably has a crapload of stuff installed on his or her system, presumably not all wanted. If somebody wants to solve that problem by going all SSD that's fine. I just don't like it when it is used as a recommendation to others, especially when the details of what was compared to what are so fuzzy.

Yeah you need to clean up your startup bro with sysconfig.msc

Looks like u've got too many exe's booting up at the same time

bikfoto wrote in post #15855475
Yeah you need to clean up your startup bro with sysconfig.msc

Looks like u've got too many exe's booting up at the same time

Even then I don't see how it matters. Win7 should be stable enough to not reboot more than twice a year.

The drive I was using was a WD Caviar 160GB SATA II (WD1600JS) and the main problem was that Windows would load in a reasonable amount of time but there was usually a lot of hard disk activity after Windows had loaded that caused my system to take a long time to be usable.

I don't have a lot of programs set to run at startup, not overly so I don't think, but can do screenshots if anyone really wants to see... I don't create system restore points.

uOpt needs to read my sig.

Use either msconfig or one of the third-party tools to find out what you're actually running on a boot. I bet you'll be rather surprised

Swann1 wrote in post #15857622
The drive I was using was a WD Caviar 160GB SATA II (WD1600JS) and the main problem was that Windows would load in a reasonable amount of time but there was usually a lot of hard disk activity after Windows had loaded that caused my system to take a long time to be usable.

It's a two fold issue the apps you have loading will bog everything down as they only load one at a time. Certain things will slow you down more then others such as messaging programs or Skype. Also as you add more and more data to a large mechanical drive it will also boot slower as there is more overhead it needs to deal with. This is why I buy more drives with the biggest cache available and try not to fill them more then 75%. Also the more you fill the drive the greater chance you will hit a bad sector and not to mention the more work mechanical parts will have to perform.

My money is on a virus scan of some sort. If you always shut down your computer before a scan finishes then it goes off again after startup. Of course a SSD helps here but it's not the way to go.

I have an SSD on my mac book pro and using lightroom is MUCH faster and I'll be adding one to my main processing computer when the time comes.