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Windows 7 Hard Drive and SSD Performance Analyzed
bigwophh writes "Despite the fact that Windows 7 is based on many of the same core elements as Vista, Microsoft claims it is a different sort of animal and that it should be looked at in a fresh, new light, especially in terms of performance. With that in mind, this article looks at how various types of disks perform under Windows 7, both the traditional platter-based variety and newer solid state disks. Disk performance between Vista and Win7 is compared using a hard drive and an SSD. SSD performance with and without TRIM enabled is tested. Application performance is also tested on a variety of drives. Looking at the performance data, it seems MS has succeeded in improving Windows 7 disk performance, particularly with regard to solid state drives."
Is is fast enough to get first post?
(Sarcasm guys)
This information is irrelevant to many of us; for a frame of reference, how does HD performance on 7 compare with XP?
This post was made in complete sincere seriousity; as such any attempts to derive humour are doomed to instant failure.
Linux already supports SSD's and other flash media by having a noop scheduler. The basic premise is that devices that don't depend on mechanical movement to access data don't need reordering of requests. This is also the scheduler you use if you have an advanced controller (RAID, etc) that is capable of doing it's own I/O rescheduling.
/dev/sda):
/sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler
/sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler
To see what scheduler you are running (on this case
# cat
noop anticipatory deadline [cfq]
Here the completely fair scheduler is currently running. To swap to the noop scheduler:
# echo noop >
[noop] anticipatory deadline cfq
Platter based hard drives and high-end solid state drives, all run faster on Windows 7. Solid state drives see the largest performance boost, which showed up to a 35% improvement in read performance and up to a 23% boost in write performance
About as much after as Vista was slower than XP. Perhaps a very marginal improvement. At most a third faster reading, and a quarter faster writing than the most hated OS of the millenium so far.
Those who like to bash Microsoft at every turn will have to find some new reasons to hate on Windows 7, as low, machine-halting performance won't likely be a factor when Win7 comes into the mix.
Nope. Same old reason to hate them. They set back operating systems on the majority of the world's PCs by half a decade.
We should be jeering not cheering.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Microsoft claims it is a different sort of animal and that it should be looked at in a fresh, new light, especially in terms of your checkbook.
There, fixed that for you.
They should have also included a benchmark test against Windows XP so that we could see how much it's decreased/increased since then. A majority of people haven't upgraded to Vista yet so it would have been useful to give an idea to those users. And perhaps, benchmarking other OSs to see how they all stand.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
Why did they fail to compare performance with Windows XP?
Too little, too late.
I'm with RaShawn now and he's taken me places I've never been before. I've never felt so...safe and secure than with him.
I'm sorry that it didn't work out between us. I hope you will find a woman who likes to do the stuff you do like play computer games and fly model rockets. I'm sorry for dragging you to all those college basketball games for I know that you will never appreaciate basketball players like I do.
Take care, you were always such a sweetheart watching my purse at the basketball dances!
Phoronix has some Linux 2.6.30 Kernel Benchmarks, some on SSD. Not surprisingly they forgot to include comparison with Windows 7, as that HotHardware article forgot to include comparison with Linux. Are they both biased?
Anyhow, SSD is the future.
Sorry, I mistook the "160GB Western Digital WD1600JS-00M SATA 2.0 hard drive" for a SSD.
Still, I don't understand how HotHardware can write: "At this point, everything seems like it's moving in the right direction with this new operating system, and Microsoft is finally showing that it can better compete in terms of usability and user-experience in today's computing environments against OSX and Linux, providing a compelling case why the Windows operating system is such a dominant force." without having compared it with OSX or Linux.
Sorry for the mixup above.
Of course Windows 7 will seem like a completely different OS if you look at it in a "new light" as MS says. OTOH, if you look at it the same way, admitting that Microsoft hasn't changed its customs and see the same bullshit as in 95 - Vista, you can't argue with them, because they can just reply "but it's different this time, just look at it with new eyes." Of course you can't compare it to anything if you try to forget what you've saw before.
I've seen bugs that have been around since Windows 95 in Internet Explorer (since 4.4 until 8.1, there's a limit of 32 <style> tags per page and MS still insists that its only a 4.4 - 6 without saying anything about 7 and that the limit is 31) and in Windows Explorer (when you try to minimize and focus applications, in certain conditions they won't listen. They have changed the way the UI looks, the kernel and added some drivers. Otherwise, I see absolutely no point in trying to analyze Windows 7's performance or compare it to previous versions of Windows. If you look at the bugs, you'll see that there have been bugs around in Windows sincefor 15 years and nobody touched them. I have given them the benefit of the doubt and installed Windows 7 RC1, hoping for a change in attitude from MS, but now I don't want to see anything about Windows again because the only change MS ever made was in the UI.
Please stop "analyzing" what Windows 7 can do and go after what's more important: what Windows 7 really is.
Going from XP to 7 Beta1 (and now RC), am I the only one who feels that the improved performance issues of Windows 7 may actually work? I installed a copy of the RC on my laptop, and it worked beyond what I expected. The Laptop was "powerful" enough for Vista, and it couldn't even compare to the performance my laptop was giving me currently.
I installed the Beta on my desktop, and only had one issue that isn't worth the words to complain about.
I know Vista may have been a flop to some people, but this just seems like a repeat of about 8-10 years ago. When ME came out, users found it abyssmal. But the solution seemed to be to go from 98SE to XP, and everyone was content.
This just seems like repeated history to me, as everyone jumps the XP ship for 7, because Vista is still taking water.
P.S. It's rather late here, apologies in advance. I'm probably rambling by now.
"I'm a well-wisher, in that I don't wish you any specific harm."
The TRIM spec is not yet final, and most SSD's will not support it until it is. It's also a safe bet that the WIndows 7 RC does not yet issue TRIM commands (for the very same reason). My testing suggests TRIM is *not* yet at play in the 7100 build of 7. The *slight* gain in write performance seen in the linked review is likely due to the fact that they used two different firmwares for the supposed TRIM enabled / disabled testing. TRIM on a Vertex would give you more than the gain they saw.
Allyn Malventano
Storage Editor, PC Perspective
this sig was brought to you by the letter
I believe that in order to have a more global picture about ssd disks performance, the comparison must be made in all OS available today, Windows flavors, Linux flavors, Unix flavors, Mac OS, Solaris and others that I maybe forget.
Until the skies turn blue...
Until the air of freedom strikes us...
I'd like to see some impartial figures to see how disk subsystem performance (regular and raided) compares with FreeBSD. You can even use FreeBSD 2.2.1 if you want.
And them again under heavy load. Not just "oooh, lets try a million database reads".
I'll wait. I use windows. I'm used to it.
Need Mercedes parts ?
The large problem with Windows XP and SSD's is that Windows XP does not properly handle SSDs similar to how Windows Vista does not. You have to go in and manually disable these things to fix performance and increase longevity while it is handled automatically in Windows 7. You cannot expect end users to "tweak" their systems to properly handle these drives, so the real world benefit of paring Windows 7 and an SSD is there that beats out both Vista and XP.
Isn't this really just tweaks to caching systems in Windows? I wonder if these performance gains also come at the price of an increased likelihood of disk corruption when the power suddenly cuts out? You might wanna buy a good UPS at the same time you install Windows 7.
...am I the only one who feels that the improved performance issues of Windows 7 may actually work? I installed a copy of the RC on my laptop, and it worked beyond what I expected. The Laptop was "powerful" enough for Vista, and it couldn't even compare to the performance my laptop was giving me currently.
;-)
I don't know if I should laugh or cry. It certainly is a glowing review.
Quack, quack.
What about programs that continuously access the hard drive. My pet peeve is the ZoneAlarm software firewall. For some reasons it reads the same file repeatedly over and over again. Not only that, but it also continuously write a completely unusable log-file (every time I actually could use a log file, it has turned out not to record the particular information I needed to debug whatever network problem I had).
In the end I've stopped using ZoneAlarm, I couldn't take the never ending "tick-tick-tick" of the hdd. Now I'm relying on my router (And XP's own "firewall").
(I did try to create a RAM disk and set ZoneAlarm to log to that - it didn't work - I seem to remember the reason being twofold, first the repeated reading of the datafile, and second, that the .ini file containing the path to the log file was written on the same drive as the log file, i.e. whenever I rebooted it would reset to the default place on the harddrive...)
It would be nice to have some kind of 'override' - "whatever this program is writing, it is of so low importance that it can be kept in the cache for +5 minutes before written to disk, regardless of what the program claims"
Having struggled with two Vista PCs for many months, I am perpetually on the lookout for a better solution. (I've even considered running XP in a VM under SuSE Linux). I have a pretty powerful desktop machine, with a 2.9MHz 4-core i7, 6GB of fast RAM, two Velociraptors and an SSD. This machine is very sluggish running 64-bit Vista SP2, and I am sick and tired of seeing everyday applications like Firefox flagged "Not Responding" (and living right up to that) for as much as minutes on end - while Task Manager shows the idle process running 85% of the time. My laptop, a ThinkPad T61 with 2GB RAM, shows similar symptoms but (oddly enough) doesn't tend to stay out to lunch quite as often or as long.
So I glommed right on to this review, hoping to see some impressive figures. But it seems to me they aren't. Improvements in disk read performance of around 10% might not change overall user responsiveness enough for you to notice it.
Why can't Microsoft simply produce a scheduler that understands the key principle: when the user wants to do something, everything else must get out of the way? Their trouble is that they just don't agree with what seems to obvious to me. It's MY computer, not theirs. I paid for it, I own it, I use it. So I want it to pay attention to ME, first, last, and foremost. Not some unnecessary housekeeping task that seem Microsoft developer or marketing chum decided to impose on me. It's ironic that an IBM mainframe should be so much more responsive than a supposedly end-user-centric "personal" computer whose OS is completely dominated by its UI.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
You bunch of idiots.
Theres not a damn thing wrong with Vista, especially when compared to anything else.
Stop trying to run it on hardware you bought in the late 90's...
When will you fools stop perpetuating such ridiculous exaggerations? I thought this was news for nerds. It's news for superficial idiots who have an incomplete understanding of just about everything.
I'll be the first to admit that I may not be a good person on the inside. With that said, I hope you people die. You won't but I will hope for it every moment I can. It's because of this mob mentality that our scientific progress is so retarded.
Windows Vista was, and still is, perceived as a slow operating system in the minds of most power users.
Only power users that consider Vista to be slow are the ones who use XP cause they've never used Vista.
Does Linux support TRIM?
and how many apps and games out there that use even 2 cores ?
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lest they use their mod points to mod down such important and relevant stuff :
I've seen bugs that have been around since Windows 95 in Internet Explorer (since 4.4 until 8.1, there's a limit of 32 tags per page and MS still insists that its only a 4.4 - 6 without saying anything about 7 and that the limit is 31) and in Windows Explorer (when you try to minimize and focus applications, in certain conditions they won't listen. They have changed the way the UI looks, the kernel and added some drivers.
im a web developer and such stuff still plagues us in this industry, EVERYday, making our daily lives harder.
what the parent poster said above says millions about the philosophy of this corporation, and one of you morons modded it down.
next time if you dont know what something is, or if you cant evaluate that the sentence 'since 95 internet explorer 4.4 UNTIL 8.1' does not mean '10 years ago' but SINCE 10 YEARS UNTIL !!!! NOW !!!!!, then dont use your mod point.
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cant these tweaks be implemented in Xp with a service pack, instead of a whole new o/s ?
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The biggest change from Vista, is that Microsoft has stripped most of the bloated DRM and security features from the installation version.
Anyone remember Palladium ?
Well, it never actually went anywhere, Microsoft just changed the name to "Secure Computing Base", this was the cause for most of the slowdown in Vista. Like checking the integrity of the running display drivers 100 times per second while watching a DVD.
So, of course Windows 7 will be faster that Vista, out-of-the-box, but just try to install a flat-scren monitor with HDMI connector, a printer, scanner, a BluRay drive and watch a BluRay movie and, ** blam !!**, you will get a good bit of the crap back on your desktop,
Not trying to excuse win7 or anything but...
XP seems like it can take that long to delete sometimes and it isn't nice enough to give you an estimate. Deletes on windows can get retarded slow when there are too many files in the recycle bin. Maybe win7 is doing something different with recycle bins on external drives? And/Or your win7 recycle bin had a lot of files in it?
Too funny. They claim to be testing/measuring TRIM on Win7-RC.
(1) The Win7-Rc1 does *not* have TRIM.
(2) The OCZ Vertext drives (firmware 1370/1.10) also do NOT have TRIM (though they do have a proprietary command and a proprietary offline app called "wiper" that will "trim" free sectors while the drive is unmounted/notinuse).
The lack of tech-savy in "reviews" is hardly amazing.
-ml
What in the hell would most of us even DO with a 16 or 24 core box besides crank up our electric and cooling bills?
emerge world
There now might be a push of SATA2 SSDs soon replaced with SATA3, so that manufacturers can sold SSDs _twice_ to power hungry users. That article could also be a part of the supposed SATA2SSD push. Not necessarily Win7 advert.
Still, I don't understand how HotHardware can write: "[...] Microsoft is finally showing that it can better compete in terms of usability and user-experience [...] against OSX and Linux [...]" without having compared it with OSX or Linux.
Did they discuss the impact that different disk timing has on usability and user experience?
Here's a bold statement: if you can write to disk faster than the network can send you data, you don't care how much faster. Here's the argument: you cache the data you want to write in memory, and then write it whenever the user isn't doing anything important.
What you really want to care about is read speeds. Either your read is small, so it's going to be fast anyways, or it's big, and then your biggest win is to do the reading in parallel. (Or you do a lot of small reads, and then you want parallel reads again, like when you boot.)
And for many of my big files, the real question is: can it be read faster than mplayer needs to play it? If so, in those cases, why do I care about faster reads?
Does windows still abandon file-copying operations when one single file out of a huge directory structure one is trying to copy from one volume to another fails?
This always annoyed me. I would fantasise about paying for my microsoft products thusly "£200? No problem. Here's the first penny, here's the second penny, here's the third penny, Ooops! I dropped the third penny! Well, that is the transaction completed, goodbye."
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
who in the right state of a brain use that software... anythink you touch that was produced by those guys has to suck... have fun runing it and let me know how is the activation going for ya
Hey, gurl!
You comin' with me and the team after the game t'night?
Ya know the guys really appreciate the "entertainment" you give us after we win a game.
Jess be sure ta wear that shawt dress I like, so it be easy for te guys to get at yo junk.
It might basically be a big press release, but I don't know that it's fair to claim they compared it to Vista simply because "they knew it sucked".
I think for the typical Windows user, the issue today is that XP has been around since 2002. Microsoft is inching ever closer to stopping any support for the product. Furthermore, it doesn't seem to be a very good option for a 64-bit OS - and PCs are rapidly moving to 64-bit capable processors. Sure, it's still the best choice for existing hardware, but when you do the next round of hardware upgrades, is XP going to still be the best option from Microsoft for you? (Some of the new systems with integrated touch-screens have really poor touch-screen support under XP, but they have full support in Vista, and it looks like even better support is being integrated into Windows 7 for them.)
Given all of that? Yes, I think the relevant question is "In how many and which ways does Windows 7 really improve on Vista?" ... because like it or not, Microsoft users are going to be moving to one or the other of those 2 options before long.
20MBps is the low end for the USB2 disks.. When I attach a USB ext3 format disk on my USB 2 hub it consitently gives me 25MB. (And I'm still using an old 32 bits kernel (Linux metelo-laptop 2.6.24-24-generic #1 SMP Wed Apr 15 15:54:25 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux).
It does not sound like Not really something to brag about.
And for many of my big files, the real question is: can it be read faster than mplayer needs to play it? If so, in those cases, why do I care about faster reads?
I know you were probably being rhetorical but, it would matter if you want seeking to be smooth. Just pointing that out.
When I first got my mac pro (2 times 4 core Xeon 2.8 GHz with 8GB of RAM) I installed XP in Virtual Box, just for kicks. That was the fastest install of Windows XP I have ever witnessed and it ran way faster that on my previous PC (3.2 GHz Pentium IV with 2 GB of RAM).
I don't really need XP for anything, so I didn't keep that setup, but it was good to know that running XP in VM is a viable option for all but the most power hungry apps (I would not run video processing apps like that for example). But then again, Windows in general has no software that I use that is not available for OS X as well.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Is the push from OEM's and Microsoft for using the 64bit version. I feel a lot of good would be done if they actually made the transition to 64bit on machines that are capable rather then installing the 32bit version.
and how many apps and games out there that use even 2 cores ?
There are some that use multiple cores, others will just max out a single core.
For instance ImageMagick's convert utility uses all 4 cores on my Linux box when I run it, even when processing a single image. Similarly, Bibble 5 Pro uses all 4 cores when I throw a batch of raw images at it. Bibble Labs did a benchmark with 16 cores (http://bibblelabs.com/products/bibble5/videos.html?vid=3), and claimed near-linear performance scaling when processing a batch of images.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Conclusion: Look into my eyes. You are going to sleep. Your eyelids are falling, falling. The numbers, they look good. Computer, it go faster, faster. You are going deeper and deeper to sleep. Way down, to sleep. Oh Windows 7! So fast, so good! Ah yes, soft, warm, moist, so so good. So deep into delicious sleep. Your body tingles, the kundalini rises, slowly at first then quickly, with all its rousing power, a release that causes you to cry out unintentionally in your dreams. Then, peace, satisfaction, oneness. When I snap my fingers, you will awaken, refreshed and satiated. You will take out your wallet. You will take out your credit card. You will buy the first Windows 7 box you see, no questions asked. You will love it. You will tell your friends what a great computer it is. You will help them buy one as soon as possible. You will feel warm and happy, as if your skin glowed with a golden spiritual light. You will be happy. You will then buy the newest release of Microsoft Office.
When you try to clean up your temp folder and select-all, delete, it won't go past the first "in-use" error to delete the rest. You have to manually choose them so it won't fail.
What kind of a cocksucker created that design? Do they specifically seek out and hire motherfuckers who never heard of graceful exception handling or User Experience at Microsoft?
Phew. Feel So Much Better Now.
Dickwads.
while i completely agree with your facts, what the original post was asking was about Vista and Windows 7 and the differences in disk speed between both.
Towards this end, i was responding with facts about Windows 7 and USB disks speed.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
So yadda, yadda, Windows 7 is better than Vista. I should hope so, since Vista is craptastic.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
VISTA not bringing in the cash? Has MS gone into the TRIM business? I want to see Bill Gates in his natty pimp suit, purple fuzzy hat and stretch limo. We can all use more TRIM!
encumbered by drm ?
excuse moi but my dinosaur of an os works much better in every respect. just a fucking ssd benchmark doesnt make or break an os. we are not buying oses for running SSDs anyway. we buy it to have our work done.
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