Recently I treated myself to a solid-state drive (SSD). That’s essentially a hard-drive made out of memory chips. I bought the Intel X25-E Extreme, which uses faster single-level cell (SLC) memory chips instead of slower multi-level cell (MLC) memory chips.

I wanted to put the drive through its paces, so I decided to see how fast I could boot Ubuntu and start Firefox. It turns out that Ubuntu 9.04, code-named Jaunty Jackalope, is just a few days away, and one of the features listed is “significantly improved boot performance.” Perfect! I installed Ubuntu 8.10 from a CD and then followed the incredibly easy instructions to upgrade to the beta of 9.04.

So how fast did Ubuntu 9.04 boot with a solid-state drive? Really freaking fast. Like, “I can’t believe it’s already done” fast. Well, here, watch for yourself:

Total boot time from pressing power to Firefox loaded was about 22.5 seconds, with about 5 seconds of BIOS display on a Thinkpad. Subtracting out the Thinkpad BIOS display time, that means that Ubuntu 9.04 booted into Firefox in about 17.5 seconds. I think I’m going to have a lot of fun with this hard drive. Oh, and Ubuntu 9.04 looks really interesting too. 🙂

For the folks that are curious, I changed the GRUB boot loader time out from three seconds to zero, enabled automatic login to my account, then I added Firefox to default list of startup services.

Added: I collected a couple boot charts by using bootchart. As Ryan said in a comment, I ran sudo apt-get install pybootchartgui bootchart , then rebooted, then collected the image in /var/log/bootchart . If I’m reading the images correctly, it’s claiming 8.67 seconds for one boot-up and 8.69 seconds for the other boot-up.

Added: Okay, I reinstalled Ubuntu 9.04 so I could use ext4 and it shaved almost a second off the boot time! Check out this image which shows a 7.83 second boot time. 🙂