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."
Depends. What were you using when making that comment?
Anyway, why doesn't the article compare to XP as well? I'm sure 7 is beter than Vista, but we all agreed that Vista was crappy anyway. Will I see any benefit moving from XP though?
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.
They also forgot the most important test with Crysis - framerates!
Older tests [anandtech.com] 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)
Well, I admit this isn't the newest test, but Win 7 was already beating XP in build 7000 [zdnet.com], heck it is worth noting that Vista vs XP comparison is not particularly bad either.
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.
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.
I just switched from 7000 to 7100 on a 1 gb netbook and saw no change in responsiveness. Both are much more responsive than XP, which liked to stall for ~3s at a time every time I ran something uncached on the Dell Mini 9's SSD. 7 hasn't done it once. You do know that in the first few hours of use it thrashes intentionally to build the index and populate superfetch, right?
This information is irrelevant to many of us; for a frame of reference, how does HD performance on 7 compare with XP?
Even more importantly, in the particular frame of reference, where XP is moving at a velocity of 38.5% c relative to Windows 7, with a time of passing of 92.3% relative to XP, do these calculations add up?
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".
Well considering this is a slash-ad for Win7, and the last time I read about Win7 and Vista going against WinXP in benchmarks it got its ass kicked [engadget.com], I am really not surprised they didn't run against XP. I especially liked the part where Infoworld said that XP should only win until you go past 8 cores, that after that Vista and Win7 should win. Of course how many of us are likely to have a 16 or 24 core box sitting around anytime soon?
Hell most of the time my Phenom dual core sits around twiddling its thumbs because it has so much more power than what is required for most everyday tasks. 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? When I built this new box I finally took the plunge and went to XP X64 and I have to say I am impressed. It has run everything I have thrown at it with the exception of a 7 year old cheapo TV tuner which I found an X64 replacement for a grand total of $34. So while I think Win7 looks purty, I think I'll just sit this one out, thanks. To anyone who hasn't tried it XP X64 is awesome if you mobo supports it. And with all the bells and whistles, along with a real firewall and AV, I'm running a grand total of 438Mb of RAM, leaving the bulk of my 4 and soon to be 8Gb of RAM for the stuff I ACTUALLY want to run, you know, things other than the OS.
Add to that the fact that XP X64 doesn't seem to be pounding the firewall wanting to call home like Vista did, along with running every single game and app I have thrown at it thanks to WOW, and I think I've found a winner. Question to you Win7 users: Does it try to phone home all the damned time like Vista did last time I tried it? Does it support the older games and apps as well as XP?
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):
I found that CFQ gave best results on my Ubuntu box. When moving files around, it was usually about 20% faster than deadline, and 100% faster than anticipatory. I can't remember if I tested noop.
On my eee 1000 (with its slow pair of SSDs) I found that while CFQ gave the best average throughput, the noop IO scheduler gave me the best disk latencies and the best interactive performance, which IMHO is much more important on a netbook than raw throughput. I think the issue is that the netbook SSDs have such slow write speeds (and no write cache on the SSD) that any long sequential write freezes all other IO for obviously noticeable periods of time. All of the 'intelligent' IO schedulers in Linux reorder IO requests so that writes happen in one long sequential block if possible to avoid seeking, which is the right strategy for traditional Winchester disks and probably even SSDs with a decent amount of write cache, but wrong for simple, slow SSDs. CFQ isn't too bad as it tries to be fair to different processes asking for simultaneous IO so there aren't too many very long writes, but the anticipatory and deadline schedulers are really painful on my eee.
noop scheduler isn't SSD support. Seems like you didn't RTFA, which means that you didn't understand what TRIM is.
From the article, page 4:
"If the drive broadcasts itself as a solid state drive (which can be done through the latest ATA specification), Windows 7 can make adjustments to ensure that the drive performs at its best. For example, if Windows 7 can verify that you're running a solid state disk, it will disable defragmentation for that drive (as defragging puts un-necessary wear on SSD's and doesn't help performance). Windows 7 will also enable support for "TRIM", also known as DisableDeleteNotify, an add-on to the ATA specification which allows for enhanced performance and decreased strain on the drive. According to Microsoft, here's what TRIM brings to the table.
* Enhancing device wear leveling by eliminating merge operation for all deleted data blocks
* Making early garbage collection possible for fast write
* Keeping deviceâ(TM)s unused storage area as much as possible; more room for device wear leveling.
Basically, Windows 7 will send TRIM commands down the storage chain, but it's up to the drive to accept the commands and utilize them. In order for TRIM to work, you not only need Windows 7, but you'll need a solid state hard disk which has support for TRIM via its Firmware."
You've quoted the marketing fluff from the article about what Microsoft says TRIM support in Windows 7 will achieve. Do you think that this is a demonstration that you understand TRIM?
I'd refer you to the link [anandtech.com] higher up the thread. Now it's a hell of a long article, but at least it explains what TRIM is. It allows blocks to be invalidated on the drive directly. Without waiting for them to be overwritten. Note that this explanation is two short sentences and explains *exactly* what TRIM is. Your quote is a marketing attempt to explain what TRIM will achieve.
So the noop scheduler would be the correct choice for a drive that supports TRIM, as the GP claimed. Although the scheduler itself will still need direct support for sending TRIM commands to the storage.
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.
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.
Phoronix has some Linux 2.6.30 Kernel Benchmarks [phoronix.com], 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?
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.
maybe they wanted to compare apples with apples? it's hard to imagine a comparison that everyone would be happy with. if windows 7 beats linux an any given benchmark (which i'm sure it would in some) the linux crowd will just boo hiss and proclaim you forgot option X, proudly declaring the comparison invalid. i can't say i blame them for staying away from that one.
And in benchmarks linux beats windows in, you'll have the windows crowd screaming murder because windows 7 isn't finished yet.
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.
It still took two service packs for users to be happy with XP.
Really? I liked the first service pack; the second service pack broke enough that was keeping me using Windows (such as a few games I liked) that I finally made the switch to using Linux full time, and I haven't looked back since (well that's not true, I've often glanced back and gone "phew, there but for the grace of Linus....")
...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.;-)
My work laptop dual-boots XP and Ubuntu. Doing the same things (Firefox, SSH sessions, music playing) on the same hardware is noticeably slower on XP and the battery lasts about an hour less. I blame the antivirus. Windows without an antivirus runs at full speed, Windows with an antivirus is as crippled as would be expected by running a watchdog program filtering literally every byte written to or from the disk or network.
Use an efficient antivirus like NOD32 and the performance hit will be significantly smaller, if detectable at all. The Symantec and McAfee real-time scanners bring most systems to a crawl, while ESET's engine is extremely lean.
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.
More importantly, TRIM does nothing for fully encrypted disks, because unused blocks must be treated like in-use blocks or you'll reveal information about the disk's content. You do encrypt all your data, don't you?
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.
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.
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.
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."
No, Vista changed this so all files that are successful will complete, then at the end any files that failed or need user interaction (like asking to overwrite) come up at the end. No more hitting 'Copy" on gigs of data and coming back hours later to find a prompt came up 30 seconds in.
But... (Score:5, Funny)
Is is fast enough to get first post?
(Sarcasm guys)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Is is fast enough to get first post?
(Sarcasm guys)
Depends. What were you using when making that comment?
Anyway, why doesn't the article compare to XP as well? I'm sure 7 is beter than Vista, but we all agreed that Vista was crappy anyway. Will I see any benefit moving from XP though?
Re:But... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:But... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Its good enough to get first place.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
you're
fixed
So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
They also forgot the most important test with Crysis - framerates!
Older tests [anandtech.com] 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)
Parent
Re:So? (Score:5, Funny)
The most likely scenario for seeing its effect would be... starting up a game, exiting, then starting the same game over again.
Ah, I see you've been playing Empire too!
Parent
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Any reviewer measuring FPS in relation to SSD performance should go get a job painting fences.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:So? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:So? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
I just switched from 7000 to 7100 on a 1 gb netbook and saw no change in responsiveness. Both are much more responsive than XP, which liked to stall for ~3s at a time every time I ran something uncached on the Dell Mini 9's SSD. 7 hasn't done it once. You do know that in the first few hours of use it thrashes intentionally to build the index and populate superfetch, right?
Parent
Re:So? (Score:5, Funny)
This information is irrelevant to many of us; for a frame of reference, how does HD performance on 7 compare with XP?
Even more importantly, in the particular frame of reference, where XP is moving at a velocity of 38.5% c relative to Windows 7, with a time of passing of 92.3% relative to XP, do these calculations add up?
Parent
Re:So? (Score:5, Funny)
Which one is going east?
Parent
Windows is an old Indian word for "bottleneck". (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well considering this is a slash-ad for Win7, and the last time I read about Win7 and Vista going against WinXP in benchmarks it got its ass kicked [engadget.com], I am really not surprised they didn't run against XP. I especially liked the part where Infoworld said that XP should only win until you go past 8 cores, that after that Vista and Win7 should win. Of course how many of us are likely to have a 16 or 24 core box sitting around anytime soon?
Hell most of the time my Phenom dual core sits around twiddling its thumbs because it has so much more power than what is required for most everyday tasks. 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? When I built this new box I finally took the plunge and went to XP X64 and I have to say I am impressed. It has run everything I have thrown at it with the exception of a 7 year old cheapo TV tuner which I found an X64 replacement for a grand total of $34. So while I think Win7 looks purty, I think I'll just sit this one out, thanks. To anyone who hasn't tried it XP X64 is awesome if you mobo supports it. And with all the bells and whistles, along with a real firewall and AV, I'm running a grand total of 438Mb of RAM, leaving the bulk of my 4 and soon to be 8Gb of RAM for the stuff I ACTUALLY want to run, you know, things other than the OS.
Add to that the fact that XP X64 doesn't seem to be pounding the firewall wanting to call home like Vista did, along with running every single game and app I have thrown at it thanks to WOW, and I think I've found a winner. Question to you Win7 users: Does it try to phone home all the damned time like Vista did last time I tried it? Does it support the older games and apps as well as XP?
Parent
Linux already has this (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I found that CFQ gave best results on my Ubuntu box. When moving files around, it was usually about 20% faster than deadline, and 100% faster than anticipatory. I can't remember if I tested noop.
Re:Linux already has this (Score:4, Informative)
On my eee 1000 (with its slow pair of SSDs) I found that while CFQ gave the best average throughput, the noop IO scheduler gave me the best disk latencies and the best interactive performance, which IMHO is much more important on a netbook than raw throughput. I think the issue is that the netbook SSDs have such slow write speeds (and no write cache on the SSD) that any long sequential write freezes all other IO for obviously noticeable periods of time. All of the 'intelligent' IO schedulers in Linux reorder IO requests so that writes happen in one long sequential block if possible to avoid seeking, which is the right strategy for traditional Winchester disks and probably even SSDs with a decent amount of write cache, but wrong for simple, slow SSDs. CFQ isn't too bad as it tries to be fair to different processes asking for simultaneous IO so there aren't too many very long writes, but the anticipatory and deadline schedulers are really painful on my eee.
Parent
Re:Linux already has this (Score:5, 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 [anandtech.com]
For RAM + battery based SSDs, while there's still a difference the difference should be unnoticeable for drive workloads.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
You lose I/O prioritisation going from CFQ to something else. Also, writes should be as sequential as possible on most SSDs.
Re:Linux already has this (Score:4, Informative)
noop scheduler isn't SSD support. Seems like you didn't RTFA, which means that you didn't understand what TRIM is.
From the article, page 4:
"If the drive broadcasts itself as a solid state drive (which can be done through the latest ATA specification), Windows 7 can make adjustments to ensure that the drive performs at its best. For example, if Windows 7 can verify that you're running a solid state disk, it will disable defragmentation for that drive (as defragging puts un-necessary wear on SSD's and doesn't help performance). Windows 7 will also enable support for "TRIM", also known as DisableDeleteNotify, an add-on to the ATA specification which allows for enhanced performance and decreased strain on the drive. According to Microsoft, here's what TRIM brings to the table.
* Enhancing device wear leveling by eliminating merge operation for all deleted data blocks
* Making early garbage collection possible for fast write
* Keeping deviceâ(TM)s unused storage area as much as possible; more room for device wear leveling.
Basically, Windows 7 will send TRIM commands down the storage chain, but it's up to the drive to accept the commands and utilize them. In order for TRIM to work, you not only need Windows 7, but you'll need a solid state hard disk which has support for TRIM via its Firmware."
Parent
Re:Linux already has this (Score:5, Insightful)
You've quoted the marketing fluff from the article about what Microsoft says TRIM support in Windows 7 will achieve. Do you think that this is a demonstration that you understand TRIM?
I'd refer you to the link [anandtech.com] higher up the thread. Now it's a hell of a long article, but at least it explains what TRIM is. It allows blocks to be invalidated on the drive directly. Without waiting for them to be overwritten. Note that this explanation is two short sentences and explains *exactly* what TRIM is. Your quote is a marketing attempt to explain what TRIM will achieve.
So the noop scheduler would be the correct choice for a drive that supports TRIM, as the GP claimed. Although the scheduler itself will still need direct support for sending TRIM commands to the storage.
Parent
Finally, it's about as fast as XP was! (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Control test? (Score:5, Informative)
Failure to compare with XP (Score:5, Interesting)
Why did they fail to compare performance with Windows XP?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
...because the benchmark is still running :)
Re:Failure to compare with XP (Score:5, 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.
Parent
More SSD Benchmarks (Score:5, Insightful)
Phoronix has some Linux 2.6.30 Kernel Benchmarks [phoronix.com], 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.
Wrong, no SSD (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:Wrong, no SSD (Score:5, Insightful)
And in benchmarks linux beats windows in, you'll have the windows crowd screaming murder because windows 7 isn't finished yet.
fuck getting in the middle of that gun fight....
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Re: (Score:2)
If they were worrying about that (doubt it - it'd just mean more page hits for them), then they shouldn't bring OSX and Linux into it at all.
Fresh new light? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Tell me why you'd possibly need 32 style tags in a HTML document?
"Fresh new light" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Really? I liked the first service pack; the second service pack broke enough that was keeping me using Windows (such as a few games I liked) that I finally made the switch to using Linux full time, and I haven't looked back since (well that's not true, I've often glanced back and gone "phew, there but for the grace of Linus....")
Even the turfers... (Score:2)
I don't know if I should laugh or cry. It certainly is a glowing review.
Re:"Fresh new light" (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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Then ditch your Windows anti-virus [msdn.com]. I've been running Windows XP for 2.5 years without it and it's great !
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Use an efficient antivirus like NOD32 and the performance hit will be significantly smaller, if detectable at all. The Symantec and McAfee real-time scanners bring most systems to a crawl, while ESET's engine is extremely lean.
TRIM is not a final spec (Score:5, 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
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More importantly, TRIM does nothing for fully encrypted disks, because unused blocks must be treated like in-use blocks or you'll reveal information about the disk's content. You do encrypt all your data, don't you?
Re:TRIM is not a final spec (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 [msdn.com]
Parent
SSD analyzed according to OS (Score:2, Insightful)
Windows XP does not support SSDs like this.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Unconvincing (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Moving off-topic a little (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."
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No, Vista changed this so all files that are successful will complete, then at the end any files that failed or need user interaction (like asking to overwrite) come up at the end.
No more hitting 'Copy" on gigs of data and coming back hours later to find a prompt came up 30 seconds in.