***Reason for slow boot up?***

[collisster]

My computer takes ages to boot up, my spec is in the sig. I'm thinking the reason is my HDD, ever since my pc went off to be repaired cuz explorer.exe wouldn't open my pc is booting really slowly.
Because I have a lot of things that need to be on my pc, I have about 5 games I play regularly, like a ton of music, and auto cad files.
Can I have different HDD for different things like
HDD 1 windows
HDD 2 games
HDD 3 music and cad

would this make things a bit quicker ? what 'raid' would this be and is it easy to set up,

help please
thanks

 

[rpstewart]

Yes you can have multiple HDDs and spread your stuff across them, this isn't RAID, just multiple disks. Spreading stuff across disks can make things quicker, for example by putting the swap file on a different disk to the OS.But with the sort of stuff you're talking about using I don't see there being a huge benefit in using multiple disks, you'd probably be better off trying to find out why your current setup is slow.

Do you know if the drive is running in PIO or DMA mode? Try running HDTach and either posting a screen grab here or just the stats (avg transfer rate, burst rate, access time etc).

 

[collisster]

here you go :

 

[rpstewart]

It looks like the drive is OK from the look of the graph, it could well be a software issue that's causing the slow down. You could try bootvis to analyse the boot process but it's a bit of a nightmare to use.

 

[collisster]

can you explain boot vis please?/

 

[MeatLoaf]

If they are IDE hard drives have you checked they are in DMA mode?

 

[rpstewart]

If they are IDE hard drives have you checked they are in DMA mode?

The screenshot shows the drive speed is fine, if it was running in PIO mode you'd see an almost constant transfer rate of about 11Mb/s across the whole disk and a much lower burst transfer rate.

can you explain boot vis please?

Not very well I'm afraid, it's been a while since I've used it. Basically it logs the boot process and shows what's happening when along with CPU and disk usage. As a result it can show whether the boot process is CPU or disk limited or if it's a delay in initialising other hardware etc.