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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."

11 of 248 comments (clear)

  1. But... by Shikaku · · Score: 5, Funny

    Is is fast enough to get first post?

    (Sarcasm guys)

    1. 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.

  2. 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. Re:So? by mrsteveman1 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Which one is going east?

    3. Re:So? by David+Gerard · · Score: 5, Funny

      Build 7000 (beta) was notably faster and slimmer than Build 7100 (RC) when we tried it here - 7000 was highly responsive and usable in 512MB, 7100 thrashes and is slow in 1GB. We were horrified. So forget 7000's admirable speed - it appears the RC was compiled with -fsuck-like-a-dyson-on-steroids enabled.

      --
      http://rocknerd.co.uk
  3. 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

  4. 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
  5. 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.

  6. 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

  7. Moving off-topic a little by zmollusc · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.