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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."

6 of 248 comments (clear)

  1. Caching, caching, and more caching by macraig · · Score: 0, Troll

    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.

  2. Re:Fresh new light? by dword · · Score: 0, Troll

    I am hating this, because that is what it really deserves. I choose to share my hate with everyone else, so they'll know they shouldn't love something like that, otherwise they'll be impressed by announcements like "it's brand new, faster, better, etc" and won't know the truth about the product. I choose not only to love what I like but to also hate what I dislike and let others know of my feelings and the reasons behind them, so they won't make the mistakes I almost made.

    Microsoft has declared war on many moral issues (eg, they simply LIE and keep Windows closed-source so if you manage to prove they're lying, you'll go to jail for reverse-engineering it) and we can't just go to the battlefield and fight with daisies. Peace is a beautiful thing that deserves all our respect, but you can't just turn the other cheek. We need to fight for the truth, we can't let anyone who wants to lie however they want. We want to reveal the truth, so everybody would know what's really going on and how Microsoft charges shitloads just for repackaging some of their products.

    They made .NET and that's really cool. They actually gave their interest and worked very hard on it and it came out as a great framework for developing all kinds of applications. All's fine and dandy, but, they will start forcing you to use (read: "buy") a new version of Windows so that you can run (read: "buy") the latest version of Visual Studio so that you can take advantage of .NET. Same goes with Office. They break things on purpose, so you'll have to use a new version of Windows to use the latest version of Office and you have to do that, because they gave it away for free to some government organization that spreads documents in the latest Office format and forces you to read them in order for you to know your rights and obligations when dealing with that government agency - and this happens in a lot of countries and you simply can't avoid it (example: my girlfriend is an accountant, she has to send documents to a government agency every month and read documents sent to her by them; they use the latest version of Office to write those documents, because they got it for free; now she has to buy the latest version of Microsoft Office to work with them).

    This is what Microsoft does. They deserve to be hated, because that should at least cast some doubt in ignorant minds. If we express our hate hard enough, then maybe those government agencies will understand what's going on and refuse the free Microsoft Office in favor of the free Open Office.

  3. Re:Failure to compare with XP by olivier69 · · Score: 0, Troll

    Why did they fail to compare performance with Windows XP?

    Because Vista was really slower than XP, and 7 is only a little bit faster than Vista (but still a lot slower than XP). That's why it was not in the benchmarks. Marketing...
    If you search for XP vs Vista vs 7 (and, why not, vs Linux) disk/networking benchmarks, you'll see what I mean.

  4. Re:Finally, it's about as fast as XP was! by BikeHelmet · · Score: 0, Troll

    I don't quite understand why this was flamebait.

    Every time the linux kernel gets updated, speeds in benchmarks (both synthetic and real world) go up.

    Sure, software like Gnome or KDE gets slower over time, but the kernel gets faster and faster.

    Exact same thing for OSX, and BSD. New versions are usually faster at specific things.

    Windows, though - always slower by a few percent with each new version of Windows. Then they patch the performance up a bit with service packs, and after that they worsen it by implementing new DRM. With Vista, media playback took a big CPU usage hit!

    If you look at the benchmarks in other articles, XP still reliably comes out ahead of Vista, and by proxy ahead of Win7.

  5. Re:But... by dave420 · · Score: 0, Troll

    No. But nice try.

  6. Re:So? by David+Gerard · · Score: 0, Troll

    We ran 7100 for about a week. The hard disk literally never stopped rattling. The tester eventually gave up on it because (1) it reliably crashed whenever the Flash video player for BBC iPlayer was made full-screen (presumably a defective video driver) and (2) she got a dual 1GHz Mirrors G4 with 1.75GB memory and Mac OS X 10.5 and a 22" Cinema Display free :-D

    --
    http://rocknerd.co.uk