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2606
April 20th, 2021 19:00
Inspiron 15 5565, decrease boot times with duel HDD and SSD
I have a Dell Inspiron 15 5565 Gaming laptop that has both SSD and HDD installed. When I bought it, it only had the SSD in it, but it was 256GB, so I added an internal HDD in the open SATA port. When I booted it up for the first time with the new configuration, the boot time had gone from 5sec to 30sec+. All of the windows system files are located on the SSD and none on the HDD. I was researching and found that the longer boot time is because the Laptop checks all attached storage devices for booting, and of course, it takes much longer to do this on an HDD. I was wondering if there was a way to either remove the HDD from the menu that searches for bootable devices or prevent the system from attempting to boot to the HDD. As mentioned above, the BIOS is by Dell (assuming BIOS changes will be needed). A note: if the changes required could cause issues such as the system not recognizing the disk at all, I would rather not take that risk. If it pertains, the HDD and the SDD are formatted as NTFS, and the SSD is in an NVMe port; they are both internal.
I am unfamiliar with the BIOS menus, but I do know how to boot into BIOS (UEFI I think) and the one-time boot menu. I was told on the Microsoft Forums to come here for more specific help (link to that discussion here). They suggested I change the boot order and remove the HDD from the boot cycle, but I do not know how to do that.
If you require further information, please ask.
Thanks!
-SpanishMoss00
jphughan
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May 3rd, 2021 22:00
@SpanishMoss00 This 2017 model will be booting in UEFI mode, not Legacy BIOS mode. UEFI booting works completely differently from Legacy BIOS booting. It does not boot from just "a device" the way Legacy BIOS does, so there wouldn't be a concept of just removing the hard drive from the boot menu. The way UEFI booting works when booting from internal storage is that each boot entry is a path to a specific file on a specific partition of a specific disk. When you first install the OS, the installer registers that path into the UEFI firmware. So your HDD would not automatically be searched for boot options. 30 seconds is quite a long time to add though. That makes me wonder if the drive might have some developing issues. One thing you can check though is that at least some Dell systems have an option to choose whether you want to perform a Minimal or Thorough hardware test at startup, and in most cases Minimal is completely fine. If your system is set to Thorough, try changing it to Minimal. If that reduces your boot time and all of your hardware devices are still available for use in the OS, then problem solved.
SpanishMoss00
5 Posts
0
May 3rd, 2021 20:00
I have a Dell Inspirion Gaming laptop that has both SSD and HDD installed. When I bought it, it only had the SSD in it, but it was 256GB, so I added an internal HDD in the open SATA port. When I booted it up for the first time with the new configuration, the boot time had gone from 5sec to 30sec+. The boot time increase happens before the windows circle thing (I assume that means this is the BIOS's doing). All of the windows system files are located on the SSD and none on the HDD. I was researching and found that the longer boot time is because the laptop checks all attached storage devices for booting, and of course, it takes much longer to do this on an HDD. I was wondering if there was a way to either remove the HDD from the menu that searches for bootable devices or prevent the system from attempting to boot to the HDD. As mentioned above, the BIOS is by Dell. A note: if the changes required could cause issues such as the system not recognizing the disk at all, I would rather not take that risk. If it pertains, the HDD and the SDD are formatted as NTFS, and the SSD is in an NVMe port; they are both internal.
I am unfamiliar with the BIOS menus, but I do know how to boot into BIOS and the one-time boot menu. I was told on the Microsoft Forums to come here for more specific help (link to that discussion here). They suggested I change the boot order and remove the HDD from the boot cycle, but I do not know how to do that.
The model of laptop is Dell Inspiron 15 7000 gaming.
If you require further information, please ask.
Thanks!
-SpanishMoss00
SpanishMoss00
5 Posts
0
May 4th, 2021 07:00
Thanks for the tip, I misspoke about it being BIOS, it is indeed UEFI. Can you give me specific instructions on how to change this? Thanks!
-SpanishMoss00
jphughan
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May 4th, 2021 07:00
@SpanishMoss00 If you're using UEFI, then you do not want to switch to BIOS mode, in fact it might not even possible on your system. But that also means that your HDD doesn't get checked as a possible boot device just because it's available, so it's unlikely that any changes would be useful or appropriate to make on your UEFI boot order. In terms of the Minimal/Thorough hardware check option, I see that on Latitude systems but don't have a lot of experience with Inspiron systems, so I'd suggest just looking through the various options available in your BIOS Setup interface to see what you can find there.