How Much Does the MBR Affect Boot Time

In my upcoming build, I am planning on dual-booting Linux Mint and Windows 8.1/10
Linux will go on a 128GB Sandisk Ultra Plus
Windows will go on a 250GB Samsung 840 EVO

Here is the question. I have to write the MBR with Linux to dual boot. Will the MBR being on the slower of the 2 drives affect boot times? If I write the MBR to the Samsung drive, will it slow down boot times by having to look to one drive and then back to the other? Is either difference going to be more than a second of difference, anyway?

Just not really that clear on how it functions.

Your BIOS will set the stage for booting your system. After you select which OS to boot, the drive it is on will determine boot speed.

The MBR won't make much of a difference at all, the only difference/delay will be the time left to make a choice of which OS to boot to.

Robert17 said:

Your BIOS will set the stage for booting your system. After you select which OS to boot, the drive it is on will determine boot speed.

Click to expand...

I would rather not manually switch the boot device if I can fast boot to GRUB or a different similar boot loader. It seems silly, I know... But it's one less button press.

Technically, it will take longer on the slower drive, but we are talking on the order of milliseconds or less. You won't notice it.

I was thinking any difference would be miniscule at best. So I think I will just write the MBR to the Linux drive.

Hi there.

There's no speed differences between the two, and if IMO you don't really need to go GPT on a drive under 2.2 TB. Basically the GPT format allows you to create more partitions, and larger ones too, but for the SSDs you have the standard MBR will do a good job (MBR allows max of 4 physical partitions per HDD, and specifies a maximum partition size too).

What matter most for the boot time is the speed, the RPM and the firmware features that the drive have.

Hope this helps.

Cheers!