I just removed hard drives from two of my husband's old computers to prepare them for recycling. One is a custom-built unit at least twelve years old. The other is about seven years old. The older one may have still been running Windows 7, the older one Windows 10, when they grew gravely ill and were replaced.
I found a single, full-size drive in each one. He's convinced that I missed something, that some tiny SSD is hiding in the carcass that enabled fast startup. "They each took less than a minute" he said, remembering the days when he could brew a cup of coffee in the time it took for everything to load.
The older drive is a Western Digital WD VelociRaptor WD3000HLFS 300GB 10000 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive. The newer one is Western Digital 1.0 TB SATA drive with 32MB cache.
Can you assure me and him that these are both fast start-up drives and I'm not missing some micro thing such as I found in a more recent laptop? That the second drives he remembers were external?
Hey Ritergal,
By today's standards, even that fast spinner would be a slow boot drive. The SATA would leave it in the dust.
Perhaps Hibernation was enabled? That would account for a nearly instant boot time (<10 seconds). I have that enabled on my Desktop and I can't make a cup of coffee in the time it takes from power on to the desktop. Not even close.
In the old pre-SSD days, ReadyBoost was an option. It would commonly use a USB drive to speed up memory transfers. Today, it is an outdated concept and much too slow to be of any use.
I would check out Hibernation as a solution to slow boot times. Hibernation does not affect reboots. Only cold boots will show a noticeable difference.
There can be many causes for slow boot times. The main culprit is usually the number of programs that start automatically when you fire up your computer. You can check them out in Task Manager -> Startup Tab. Disable the ones you don't need running all the time. They sap your system of valuable resources. All. Day. Long.
Hope this helps,
Richard
Thanks Richard. Your suggestion might help if I hadn't already dismantled things enough that starting them up is no longer an option. His only concern is data security. He seems finally convinced that no tiny hard drive is lurking on the motherboard.
Whatever the case, reminding him that SATA drives were a watershed moment for faster start-ups and that he has used external drives for most data storage all those years has calmed him down. Logic is returning. Those old drives are relatively small, so they'll sit in a box, probably for the rest of his life, waiting for him to find the right moment and a dock to boot them up on another machine, just in case he did not retrieve absolutely everything that might matter before they meet a sledge hammer.
Hi ritergal,
I am pretty sure this would be down to the "Fast Startup" feature in Windows and nothing to do with the drives. When Fast Startup is enabled the system doesn't go into a full shutdown but rather into a state of hibernation, which means that the system loads a lot faster.
Cheers... Jim
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