SSD Performance in Windows 7 – Does it Really Make a Difference?

Well I finally got my hands on an X25-M SSD drive from Intel (Thanks Alistair!) and have put it through its paces on my home built PC. The main thing to say here is that you don’t need the latest SSD to get an improvement when using Windows 7 as the operating system is an improvement in itself in terms of performance tweaks and such like.

Whenever I write a new review based on an operating system, I always like to see how the disk performance is; one of the main problems in Windows Vista was that the operating system was nearly always thrashing away at the system hard drive. There were a number of reasons for this such as indexing, caching etc but when you first boot up, it could be some time before you could actually get into folders, files or generally do anything you wanted.

Loads of users inundated Microsoft forums and newsgroups with complaints about slow disk performance, so much so that Microsoft eventually (nearly a year later) released an update to their disk caching algorithms within Windows Vista Service Pack 1. This was quite a major improvement over the original which improved both performance and the general feel of using the operating system. Again the problem was that it wasn’t enough for most users and a lot of people avoided bothering to upgrade to Windows Vista for this reason, it was viewed as a slower operating system than Windows XP – something it shouldn’t have been.

Now with Windows 7, no matter what type of hard drive you use, you will notice that there is an improvement right away with disk performance, for normal hard drive users things are not at lightening speed, but the hard drive does settle down much faster than it did in Windows Vista, it also spends less time rattling away when you first boot up.

Windows Vista vs Windows 7 – Normal Hard Drives

Disk Read Speeds:

Average:

Windows Vista: 62
Windows 7: 62

Burst:

Windows Vista: 104
Windows 7:  108

Disk Write Speeds:

Average:

Windows Vista: 61
Windows 7: 61

Burst:

Windows Vista: 104
Windows 7: 108

As was expected, plain normal hard drives are not showing much of a boost when used with Windows 7 compared to that of Windows Vista. The speeds in my tests are showing about the same for my raptor drive in both Vista and Windows 7, although there is a very tiny increase in burst transfer rates, though this isn’t enough to say that there is a major boost.

Windows Vista vs Windows 7 – Intel SSD 80gb

Disk Read Speeds

Average:

Vista: 185
Windows 7: 227

Burst:

Vista: 207
Windows 7: 234

Disk Write Speeds:

Average:

Windows Vista: 54
Windows 7: 55

Burst:

Windows Vista: 86
Windows 7: 104

As you can see – these are massive improvements over Windows Vista in both average disk read speeds and burst speeds. Things are not as clear cut when it comes to writing to the disk though with only the burst speed there showing a major difference.

The main difference you will notice with an SSD attached to your PC and with Windows 7 installed is the boot time improvement – my i7 920 boots in just 10 seconds, that is a massive speed increase over Windows Vista and any other Windows operating system before it. Not only that, once Windows 7 loads, there is almost no hard drive noise and you can use your PC right from the moment the desktop loads up.

So my verdict is that if you can afford it, you should certainly have an SSD installed in your PC, even if it is only 80gb, you can use that as your main system drive with a traditional large 1 or 2 TB hard drive as your main storage for games and such like. Loading of games is dramatically improved with an SSD, but again games take up a lot of space and to get a larger sized SSD you will have to pay out a lot of money right now, but for a Windows 7 user, SSD is the way to go for better performance.