What’s the point of having a SSD if both Windows 8 and Ubuntu 15.04 introduce artificial timeouts that increase the boot time, making this equivalent as having a standard hard drive? Well, I’m there, I reached that point.
Windows 8 often boots fast from EFI to login screen but after I enter my password, it sometimes reaches the desktop in five seconds, sometimes hangs for 30 to 45 seconds. There is no obvious reason why, no way to track this down and no obvious solution other than deleting my user account and creating a new one. I cannot spend my weekends doing, redoing, redoing and redoing that. This is just pointless and inefficient! I could try to reinstall, but then I will have trouble with reactivating Windows, reauthorizing Ableton’s Live and have to spend hours waiting for manual installation of countless drivers and software tools. Ninite can help with programs, not with drivers.
Some time later, I found out that uninstalling and reinstall the driver for my M-Audio interface fixed the slow boot up. There seems to be a conflict between the M-Audio’s Fast Track Pro and Novation’s UltraNova drivers. Windows 10 also seemed to stabilize things a bit.
Ubuntu, most of the times, boots quickly. However, starting from 15.04, it was taking almost a minute from splash screen to login screen. I had to spend more than half an hour looking at syslog to figure out that the swap partition changed UUID but the update script didn’t reflect that into /etc/fstab. Several people repeat that we shouldn’t do dist-upgrades and rather reinstall, but then, why is there a dist-upgrade option at first place? Fortunately, fixing the partition ID in /etc/fstab restored my boot time.
This is not SSD-specific issues, but they cause the SSD to be less useful. Another factor reducing usefulness of SSD is the never-ending size increase of OS and applications, especially when dealing with virtual machines. This ultimately fills any SSD, requiring time consuming reorganization of the layout (partition resizing, copying on a larger drive, etc.).
I don’t want to go backward, switching from SSD to an hard drive, but practice seems to tell me I should. This is disappointing and quite frustrating.