Quick booting...

[krutaw]

I've been playing with settings on my sagetv box and been trying to get it to boot just as fast as possible. And then it hit me....

What if instead of booting from a regular hard drive, I had booted from a compact flash card (usb 2.0)? I mean, you can get a 2.0gb compact flash card now (still out of my pricerange for this little project, however, it could be done) and with a 2gb drive, you could install windows directly to it.

Has anyone tried this, or even thought about it? I'm just thinking that it should boot faster than any hard drive ever could. This should make it boot up just as fast as that one black box that is way over-priced that does some of the cool things that SageTV can do... I'd say the name, but it's a four letter word..

Seriously, does anyone know if this is even possible? Ideas, theories?

[Colin]

Not really.. About the fastest Compact Flash card I've seen is only 10MB/s, where a Serial ATA drive is 150MB/s..

[krutaw]

Originally posted by Colin
Not really.. About the fastest Compact Flash card I've seen is only 10MB/s, where a Serial ATA drive is 150MB/s..

But since what we're really talking about here is boot time, wouldn't the seektime hold more of important role than actual throughput? And with seektime being 9.xms on a serial ATA, and less than 1ms on a compact flash, it should boot faster.

Though I do like the fact that I could outfit my machine with a serial ata drive / card for about a hundred bux.

[LostInSpace]

Why don't you use the 'hibernate' functionality of WIN XP. it only take a few second to restore your system as you left it?

[Tej]

A CF card won't help.

Most of the bootup time is spent by Windows setting up it's drivers, testing for hardware and network connections. Only a minor portion is consumed by disk reads. Fast seek times don't help, as the OS then has to read the data (the actual programs and drivers) off the drive to load them into memory.

If you want a fast boot time, use XP Pro. I can get a fresh install to show the desktop in about 22 seconds, once I unload any unnecessary services in the background, but out-of-the-box it will show the desktop in under 30 seconds. The hourglass will usually hang around another 20-30 seconds as things continue to load in the background.

Perfect for a dedicated HTPC.

[Tej]

A CF card won't help.

Most of the bootup time is spent by Windows setting up it's drivers, testing for hardware and network connections. Only a minor portion is consumed by disk reads. Fast seek times don't help, as the OS then has to read the data (the actual programs and drivers) off the drive to load them into memory.

If you want a fast boot time, use XP Pro. I can get a fresh install to show the desktop in about 22 seconds, once I unload any unnecessary services in the background, but out-of-the-box it will show the desktop in under 30 seconds. The hourglass will usually hang around another 20-30 seconds as things continue to load in the background.

Perfect for a dedicated HTPC.

[falchulk]

People have been using winxp embeded and linux on flash drives for a while to get quick bootup. Hibernate is not the fastest form of power management, Use Suspend to ram standby. My system takes 3 seconds to become available.