An SSD can make a world of difference. Most of the time spent during boot up is in executing random reads (of about 4Kb size) from storage, and SSDs are a factor of magnitude faster there
Sorry, most of a box's boot time is the BIOS and other stuff. The servers I run at work take 3-4 minutes to boot, the last twenty seconds or so is the OS coming up. The consumer PCs I use have a similar ratio.
POST time is crazy bad. It's almost like the engineers working on it don't care.
In that case, you shouldn't be looking for an answer to "how can I make a faster (rebooting) horse," but rather "is there a way to make this redundant, so that a single node offline won't critically endanger the system?"
In all 25 years I've used computers, I can't recall having a PC that took more than a minute to POST. Ever. My current PC's fast boot is fast enough that it looks like the computer turns on and goes straight to Windows.
All of my machines are the same. From the time I plug in the power cable and hit the go button I can expect to see my desktop in around 10 seconds. It's fast enough that when I'm in discord with coworkers and need to switch OS it doesn't really affect the workflow at all.
I'm curious about why a workplace would settle on Discord. Are you in game development, is there a killer feature that Discord has compared to the competition, or was it just what people were comfortable with at home?
Not implying that it's bad software, I'm just curious because it sounds unusual.
I can think of several reasons. #1 for us, is that we're a marketing agency serving a lot of the gaming industry, so working with content creators or industry folk who sometimes default to discord is convenient. That said, Discord is a free quick and easy tool that everyone can install, on any os, and be up and running anywhere in the world for comms in less than a minute. In the box, there's video conferencing, screen sharing, chat, and more.
The example I gave above happens regularly, as I use Deepin Linux as my typical daily driver while I'm working. However, if the need to open an adobe suite tool comes up, I can quickly swap over. Discord works fine for me on both platforms and my phone.
All in all, I don't really like discord all that much. It's not the best at anything. But it has the advantage of being both convenient and feature-rich overall. There are better solutions out there, but none are as convenient or free.
