As I read over this article which basically details how “replacing” some sectors in a drive with Flash would speed startup/shutdown and overall system performance, what people seem to bypass in factoring system bootup/shutdown speed is:
Drivers.
Initialization of hardware is a big factor in delays, though it does not affect casual users as much as it does true geeks. It does play an important role in
system uptime past BIOS init (which in most modern motherboards is plenty
fast and quite satisfactory, IMHO).
Anyone with SCSI drives/components who has played with bootvis can attest
to that.
What I’d like to see when I boot is my drive usage LED pegged to the max,
non-stop. That’s when a more drastic improvement in boot speed would come from
solid-state or hybrid drives.
I’m also intrigued by the OS’s ability to assign sectors to the flash; I
would like the ability to store a good portion of the OS, such as the most-used Windows
files there. But with a large enough flash addon, why stop there? It’s just too bad games
these days are so large, or I’d like the option of assigning whatever current game I’m playing to
such “special” sectors.
Bottom line: I welcome faster drives in any incarnation; I’ve always used
the fastest drives within reason I could find, starting with one of the
first 7200 RPM desktop drives by IBM, to a couple Raptors currently.
I think people are neglecting hardware init as a factor in boot times.
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