New SSDs with Marvell 88SS9174-BKK2 controller and OS Boot Time with UEFI on Sandy Bridge Platform
On January 9th, 2011, Intel released a new PC platform for Sandy Bridge CPUs with P67/H67 chipsets and UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface). Lenovo prototype laptop PC cold-booted in 13 seconds, as far as I see, in this YouTube clip. You may not be getting a quick cold system boot with some of the deluxe motherboards, I could see a pretty fast system boot with Biostar H67 motherboard with Core i7-2600K and the most modern Plextor SSD with Marvell 88SS9174-BKK2 controller, which had been already commercially available. The above flash video booting in 16 seconds were tested with the system below on February 5th, 2011.
It is unfortunate that the new motherboards are recalled and unavailable for the time being because of defects in SATA II ports. SATA III ports have no problems and I had used only the good ports for the measurements.
Windows 7 was first clean installed into ANS-9010, and the Acronis 11 backup image was taken from that and restored to 128GB Plextor M2S with the gap of 67.72MB on top of the drive to maintain the partition alignment of the SSD. In some of the SSDs, malaligned partition (=misaligned partition) was intentionally created without this 67.72MB gap on top of the drive. Under the good partition alignment, the OS boot time with Plextor M2S was 16.23 seconds and with the malaligned partition 16.33 seconds.
The same way, I had measured the cold boot time with other SSDs. The results that I had measured are put in the table below.
*************** OS Cold Boot Time with SSDs **************
Optimally Aligned Partition
Malaligned Partition
ANS-9010 14GB
n/a
15.76 sec
X25-M G2 80GB
16.22 sec
16.24 sec
Plextor M2S 128GB
16.23 sec
16.33 sec
Real SSD C300 64GB
16.32 sec
16.35 sec
A-DATA s592 32GB
n/a
16.39 sec
Kingston SVP100S2/96GB
16.33 sec
16.73 sec
Toshiba HG2 64GB
16.46 sec
16.75 sec
OCZ Vertex 2 50GB
n/a
16.76 sec
Kingston SNV125-S2/30GB
n/a
17.97 sec
CSSD-SM64WJ3 32GB
n/a
19.13 sec
OCZ Apex 120GB
n/a
20.02 sec
If you use 32-bit Windows 7 instead of 64-bit, in which the file sizes are smaller, and disable "Onboard PCIE Giga LAN" in UEFI, then you can cut the OS boot time further 2 seconds than the time shown in the table above, which I had confirmed later. This is pretty much the same with OS launching time of Lenovo prototype laptop PC in the YouTube clip. (*1 See below.)
ANS-9010 was a little faster because this product utilizes DDR2 instead of NAND flash memories.
The SSDs with modern controllers have similar results and the difference was unnoticeable except JMicrons.
It is often stated that 4K random write performance is very important for OS and application boot time, but comparing the cold boot time in the well-aligned partition and the malaligned partition, the difference was unperceivable for me even though the benches are quite different as below.
C300 aligned C300 malaligned
***** 4K Random Write Bench Result in 1000MB File Test*****
Optimally Aligned Partition
Malaligned Partition
Real SSD C300 64GB
59.84MB/s
4.845MB/s
Kingston SVP100S2/96GB
41.05MB/s
7.937MB/s
OCZ Vertex 2 50GB
71.11MB/s
17.96MB/s
Toshiba HG2 64GB
14.54MB/s
7.039MB/s
X25-M G2 80GB
50.40MB/s
48.67MB/s
Plextor M2S 128GB
47.56MB/s
40.03MB/s
A-DATA s592 32GB
9.164MB/s
7.632MB/s
Marvell 88SS9174-BJP2, Toshiba and SandForce controllers have bench score difference pretty much as above, and X25-M, Marvell 88SS9174-BKK2 and Indilinx controllers have less difference like this one below.
Plextor aligned Plextor malaligned
Marvell 88SS9174-BKK2 controller's highest performance in Plextor M2S SSDs had been merely available with just AMD's SB850 platform users. When the Intel's P67/H67 platforms are back again from recall, then the Intel users can also enjoy the higher sequential write speed in SSDs with Marvell 88SS9174-BKK2 controllers like Plextor M2S, Corsair Performance 3 Series, A-DATA S501, future RealSSD C400 (internals) and Intel SSD 510 Series (PCB) as well as the present RealSSD C300. Here the benches for RealSSD C300 256GB and Plextor M2S 256GB on Intel Sandy Bridge platform described above.
RealSSD C300 Plextor M2S
When there is no bottleneck in the new Intel platform system, the results are identical with the ones obtained in AMD's system.
*1 (This description is added on Feb. 28th, 2011.):
I was all curious about the fastest booting computer. Using my business PC, I have disabled redundant functions for my business use and grabbed an ANS-9010 temporarily for this cold boot test.
Commercially available PC with 32-bit version of Windows 7 cold-booted in just 12.16 seconds on Google Android based Xperia display and would be about 12.5 seconds after adjusting manual delay until the Windows 7 boot screen first comes in sight, which is close to the Lenovo prototype computer.
Plextor malaligned 
Plextor M2S 
