Windows 7 Beta beats Vista SP1 in SSD Performance
After Bit-Tech’s somewhat failed attempt at digging for improvements in Windows 7 Beta over Vista SP1, TweakTown has posted up a review on SSD performance improvements and were able to find somewhat significant increases in SSD performance in Windows 7. Keep in mind that we are still dealing with beta material so nothing is set in stone yet when it comes to benchmarks. TweakTown’s tests show that Windows 7 comes on top when it comes to read speeds, write speeds, access time, and CPU usage.
Microsoft previously announced that Windows 7 will be optimized for SSDs. When an SSD is detected, Windows automatically changes the way it works with hard-drives to better utilize SSDs. Once such improvement is turning off defrag. Defrag has no effect on SSDs because they store data differently. Another optimization is the “Trim” feature, which helps keep the SSDs unused storage area as free as possible to enhance driver wear levelling. There are many other improvements that have been made to utilize SSDs. You can read a detailed article on them here.
Click here to read TweakTown’s Solid State Drive Performance Review.
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Tags: windows 7, windows 7 solid state drive, windows 7 ssd, windows 7 ssd performance, windows 7 ssds
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10 Responses to “Windows 7 Beta beats Vista SP1 in SSD Performance”
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You write “Defrag has no effect on SSDs due to the unique way SSDs store data.”
In what way is it /unique/?
I thought defragmentation was not necessary due to the very low seektime on SSD. I know SSD uses some algorithms to store data, because of the limited number of times a ’sector’ can be written, but I always thought that it would lead to more fragmented data.
I heard Windows7 performs great on multi-core PCs. Hope you will do an experiment and publish here.
>>”I thought defragmentation was not necessary due to the very low seektime on SSD.”
SSDs require free space consolidation more than defragging…this is said to reduce random writes which are the weakness of SSDs. Diskeeper has an SSD optimizer called Hyperfast which does this and some other optimizations..
http://www.diskeeperblog.com/archives/2008/12/hyperfast_is_al.html
Defrag and wear levelling also don’t interfere with each other according to the Diskeeper engineer.
[...] Windows 7 Beta beats Vista SP1 in SSD Performance | Windows 7 Center [...]
SSDs may not benefit from a tradiotnal defrag, but as Lazarus said it is common knowledge SSDs suffer from alimited number of erase-write cycles, optimizing free space would help that. I will check out Diskeeper’s product.
These comments sound like an advert for Diskeeper. SSD drives do not need special defragmentation software.
Any third party application is nothing more than an attempt to make money off those who don’t know better.
Agree. I use JkDefrag – it’s free, opensource and works great.
http://www.kessels.com/Jkdefrag/
I have it scheduled to run every day on my laptop. It can be a little nerdy (command line options), but great once it has been setup. It uses Windows own API for defragging (just like all? the other defrag programs), so it’s just as safe as any other program.
SSD drives require optimization of the data layout to extract the best performance, according to the guy from Intel.
http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTYxMSwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==
I don’t think a ‘conventional’ defragger that does not minimize file movement during the ‘defrag’ will be the best choice. Defragging an SSD conventionally is *not* a good idea at all because of the erase/write cycle limitations.
From what I can make out (I own neither an SSD nor Hyperfast), the Hyperfast optimizer (a) consolidates free space and (b) somehow forces the filesystem to write sequentially in the available free space. Maybe by caching? I don’t know….but it seems to work.
BTW, JKdefrag cannot defragment system files unlike the commercial defragmenters. All Windows defraggers use the same defrag API, but they are definitely not the same- each one has different capabilities and different algorithms for defragmentation and file layout.
“JKdefrag cannot defragment system files unlike the commercial defragmenters”.
Is defragging systemfiles more difficult or do they use non-standard ways to do this (eg. not using the defrag API to defrag)?
Sorry, but I don’t know the details, Anders. From what I understand, the function to defrag/move the MFT and atleast some system files is built into the defrag API*. However, the free defragmenters as well as (ironically) the default XP defragger cannot/do not utilize this capability. As a result it is only the heavyweights like Diskeeper that actually defrag these files. I believe the Vista defragger can also move the MFT..not sure of it’s other capabilities.
* Coincidentally, the defrag API was developed jointly by Diskeeper and Microsoft in the 90s and improved for the XP release.