Windows 7 Hard Drive and SSD Performance Analyzed 248
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."
So? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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)
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.
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: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....
"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.
Re:But... (Score:1, Insightful)
you're
fixed
Lol you're an idiot.
SSD analyzed according to OS (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Windows XP does not support SSDs like this.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Finally, it's about as fast as XP was! (Score:1, Insightful)
How is linux still stuck in the 90s when it supports drive encryption, loopback mounting, and a ton of other things you have to pay for or download off a shady website to work on windows?
Not to mention Ubuntu's package management system is eons ahead of anything windows based.
haha, captcha = provoked
Re:Linux already has this (Score:0, Insightful)
Only on Slashdot could an inaccurate post be modded "Informative" simply because it "bigs up" Linux.
Re:"Fresh new light" (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Any reviewer measuring FPS in relation to SSD performance should go get a job painting fences.
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.
Re:"Fresh new light" (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:But... (Score:2, Insightful)
I always get a great laugh about boot times and how intense all the benchmarks are. I certainly don't care if it takes 15 seconds, or 30 seconds. What I do care about is that it does what I want. I maybe reboot my PC once every 2 weeks or so.