@CaseySJ @manfriday
I have noticed a significant increase in boot times with my Z390 Designare (flashed TB chip) with every beta release of Monterey. I thought with the final release version there might be an improvement, but that is not the case.
I have two 500 GB Samsung 970 EVO SSDs. I confirmed both have the latest firmware. One for macOS and one for Windows. I have never experienced any slow boot issues with any OS I have run.
I have an external TB3 enclosure that contains a 1TB Samsung 970 EVO SSD, with the latest firmware, that I plug into the Z390's TB port to hold bootable backups of Big Sur and Monterey. I decided to also time the boot time using TB.
All boot times listed are using the same EFI folder using OC 0.7.4. Tweaks suggested in prior thread posts to improve boot times were tried, but made no significant difference:
Big Sur 11.6 - 34 Seconds
Monterey 12.0.1 (internal SSD) - 68 Seconds
Monterey 12.0.1 (external TB3) - 34 Seconds
During the Monterey boot using the internal SSD, booting stalls at one point for about 35 seconds. This accounts for all the additional boot time. This screen shot shows the stall point. A Mac expert may be able to decipher why this is happening.
When booting Monterey from the TB external drive it flies right through this code.
Here's the System Report for the TB Device Tree.
Here's the System Report for the NVMExpress:
This info seems to indicate that Monterey has introduced some compatibility issue between the NVMe board hardware and the Samsung 970 EVO.
What's a surprise to me is the boot performance of the Samsung 970 EVO over TB3.
Boot times are not very important for me as it is easy enough to sleep the system.