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Windows 7 Hard Drive and SSD Performance Analyzed

Posted by timothy on from the but-compared-to-the-old-one dept.

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."

8 of 248 comments (clear)

  1. Linux already has this by Saba · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    To see what scheduler you are running (on this case /dev/sda):

    # cat /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler
    noop anticipatory deadline [cfq]

    Here the completely fair scheduler is currently running. To swap to the noop scheduler:

    # echo noop > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler
    [noop] anticipatory deadline cfq

    1. Re:Linux already has this by TheLink · · Score: 4, Informative

      noop scheduler != support for SSDs.

      Sequential writes in common Flash SSDs are faster than random writes. Sequential reads are also usually faster than random reads.

      See: http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3531

      For RAM + battery based SSDs, while there's still a difference the difference should be unnoticeable for drive workloads.

      --
  2. Control test? by viyh · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  3. TRIM is not a final spec by AllynM · · Score: 4, Informative

    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 /.
    1. Re:TRIM is not a final spec by mooglez · · Score: 5, Informative

      According to one of the Win7 developers blog post, the TRIM is already being used in the Windows 7 RC release.

      It's just a matter of getting firmwares that support said TRIM command out in to the existing SSD's now.

      Yes, Trim is already in the Win7 RC.

      Trim is enabled by default but can be turned off. You can use the "fsutil behavior query|set DisableDeleteNotify" command to query or set Trim.

      from the comments section of this:
      http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

  4. Re:Failure to compare with XP by Tanman · · Score: 4, Informative

    Well, maybe they did. However, if the article's opening paragraph was:

    Windows 7 accessed data noticeably faster than Windows Vista, although still not as fast as XP. However . . .

    Most of us would never get past that first line there.

  5. Re:But... by David+Gerard · · Score: 4, Informative

    Because the entire article is basically a press release for Windows 7. They compare it to something they know sucks, because they know it wouldn't look nearly as good compared to the thing (XP) people are actually running now.

    --
    http://rocknerd.co.uk
  6. Re:But... by Rycross · · Score: 5, Informative

    Well, AnandTech benchmarked Windows 7 against XP. It did well, and beat XP in many categories. There you go, no need to thank me.