Booting from m.2 drive is much slower than it should be

Hello everyone,

A few months ago I installed a new m.2 SSD to which I moved my Windows 10 installation. At first it booted up very quickly (within just a few seconds). Now, however, booting takes 2 minutes or longer.

I have searched around and found this thread: Boot Time painfully slow on WD m.2 SSD Drive

I followed the instructions by bro67 to run a boot trace, and I have tried to look at the resulting file, but I am having a difficult time analyzing all of this data and was hoping someone here might be able to help me out.

Here is the file: Download - TransferNow

Thank you very much in advance for any help you may be able to provide!

dalchina said:

Hi, only @zinou here is proficient with the Windows Performance and Analyser tool. Inspection of such things and advice on taking appropriate traces is somewhat time consuming. Noted that's a 434Mb file valid for 6 days from 14th.

Fair enough, thanks for the response. I guess I was hoping that someone would know which part of the data contains the stuff that zinou pointed out in the thread I linked. Just to point me in the right direction. As it stands I can't find any "DeviceStart" tasks for example.

Your computer is never going to boot as fast as it did when you first installed Windows. It will boot slower and slower as Windows is updated, more software is installed and updated, etc. You could also delete any quick launch apps off the taskbar and reduce the items in the startup to a minimum. You have to decide what is important to you. The question is how fast given current circumstances should your computer boot. The problem is you could reduce the time now and be right back to where you were a few months from now.

I checked my boot time and noticed it had gone up some. I ran Disk Cleanup and deleted the files in: C:\Users\<YourUserName>\AppData\Local\Temp. My boot time is now 108 seconds where before it was 130 seconds. I am not going to waste any more time trying to do better.

I loaded your etl file and saw that your total boot time was 111 seconds. How fast is acceptable to you?

MisterEd said:

Your computer is never going to boot as fast as it did when you first installed Windows. It will boot slower and slower as Windows is updated, more software is installed and updated, etc. You could also delete any quick launch apps off the taskbar and reduce the items in the startup to a minimum. You have to decide what is important to you. The question is how fast given current circumstances should your computer boot. The problem is you could reduce the time now and be right back to where you were a few months from now.

I checked my boot time and noticed it had gone up some. I ran Disk Cleanup and deleted the files in: C:\Users\<YourUserName>\AppData\Local\Temp. My boot time is now 108 seconds where before it was 130 seconds. I am not going to waste any more time trying to do better.

I loaded your etl file and saw that your total boot time was 111 seconds. How fast is acceptable to you?

Thank you for your reply.

From my research, most people who have their copy of Windows on a m.2 SSD have boot times under 20 seconds, so that's what I am aiming for.

dalchina said:

Could I check- do you mean from a cold boot to lock screen?

This PC has never had a clean install since I got it with a clean installed Win 10. That was build 1803 I think. Lenovo Thinkpad t440s with a SATA SSD.

Cold boot time to lock screen is 9-10s.

Yes, that's correct. From the time I push the power button until the login screen is reached.

The PC booted up much faster before when my Windows installation was on a SATA SSD, which makes me think there is something going wrong here (since it should be even faster on an m.2 drive).

Pejole2165 said:

A boot time of 2 minutes from an SSD (SATA 2.5", SATA or NVME M.2) seems wrong, it may be that your BIOS is detecting other devices that are slowing down the boot time, slower spinning HDDs, external drives plugged in etc, try disabling any unnecessary options in the BIOS, unplugging any non essential external devices. Also check that you are using AHCI for disk controllers in the BIOS, see if there is a specific manufacturers driver for your SSD.

Thank you for your reply. Yes, I suspect the issue is one of the things you've mentioned, which is why I posted my boot trace file in the hopes that someone might be able to point me to where in the file I might find some information that leads me to the source of the issue. I didn't realize that there is really only one user around here who looks at such files.

I will try the software you mentioned. Thank you again!