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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."

3 of 248 comments (clear)

  1. So? by Seriousity · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:So? by BikeHelmet · · Score: 5, Insightful

      They also forgot the most important test with Crysis - framerates!

      Older tests have proven that SSDs have a massive impact on the minimum framerate for texture hungry games. Waiting 15ms for some textures is bad since that wastes most of that whole frame.

      I don't understand why the article writer is so enamored by burst speeds. Burst is just data coming in from cache... my old 320GB Seagate drives get burst speeds over 200MB/sec. I threw four of them in RAID and was enjoying a comfortable 700MB/sec burst speed; though sustained read was barely over 220MB/sec.

      But burst almost never comes into play. The most likely scenario for seeing its effect would be... starting up a game, exiting, then starting the same game over again. Although I suppose burst is several seconds long, so it does reflect on the drives' skill in reading data before it's needed. (Something SSDs don't really have to do, so no impressive data bursts; just super high sustained read)

  2. Windows XP does not support SSDs like this.. by magamiako1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.