Boot Order Impact Time & Questions

[Luba]

I know at least in the old days with PCs that a PC will look for the boot drive in a certain sequential order, does the 2009 Mac Pro do that? I plan on installing a SSD boot in Bay 3 and will tell the OS that the boot is in Bay 3 but will the MP still look in sequential order, i.e. optical drive then Bay 1, Bay 2, etc., for the boot drive? I realize even if it did and my boot is in Bay 3 it would only slow down the startup process by at most a few seconds. I just want to optimize the setup. 🙂

Any other issues affecting the speed of the startup process?? Slow vs. fast devices, device releases, and controller that can "talk" to multiple devices simultaneously.

Thanks for any info. I guess this is an obscure question because I couldn't find anything when I did a search.

 

[Dr.Pants]

To answer your question, my G5 used to have two bootable drives in it, and I used my install in Bay 2 all the time - startup time didn't appear to be affected.

 

[Tesselator]

Yeah, but that's a G5. Isn't this a function of the intel chipset which isn't in the G5 at all? So not relevant?

 

[Dr.Pants]

Yeah, but that's a G5. Isn't this a function of the intel chipset which isn't in the G5 at all? So not relevant?

Proabably not; however, the largest letters on a G4 mobo was on the Intel logo 🙂

However, for something more relevant, isn't the southbridge on 2009 MacPro is ICH10? In that case, would it not work the exact same way? So the question would be does ICH10 search in sequential order?

Personally, I would think that it wouldn't - with a good amount of people caring about how fast their PCs boot, the industries involved would probably have worked a way to at least scan the drives for an OS in parallel.

And I would answer the ICH10 question, but my internet dish needs re-aligning again😡

 

[gugucom]

A disk in the disk drive will slow booting down considerably.

Bay position of boot drive I have never checked but OS X and Windows will certainly boot from all bays. I havn't realized a speed difference yet.

RAID0 software arrays tend to take more time in EFI loading but not in actually booting.

Nehalem Mac Pro is basd on Intel 5520 main boards and has a ICH10R south bridge althoug QPI takes a lot of the functionality out of the chipset I read.