Windows 7 Hard Drive & SSD Performance Analyzed

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, May 28, 2009, 11:34 AM EDT

Windows 7 is undoubtedly the most exciting new operating system to come out of Microsoft within the past decade--and with good reason. The user interface is superb, gone are many of the oddball Vista quirks, and the operating system is light and snappy, marking a massive 180 degree shift away from the heaviness and bloat of Vista. Despite the fact that it's based on many of the same core Vista elements, Windows 7 is a different beast, and should be looked at in a fresh new light.

As with any new operating system release, there are a lot of questions with regards to how it will perform on various hardware configurations--one of the more interesting ones being related to disk performance. So, today we're going to look at how various types of disks perform under Windows 7, both of the traditional platter based variety and new solid state disks. We're not only curious about how disk performance changes between the operating systems, but want to see if Windows 7's new solid-state specific optimizations and tuning give users even greater performance compared to Vista...

Windows 7 Hard Drive and SSD Performance Analyzed

Tags: Hard Drive, SSD, HD, Windows 7, Storage, Solid State Drive, Windows, Win7

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com