Windows 7 Beta Beats Vista in Brutal SSD Showdown

Hardware website Tweaktown has tested how well Windows 7 Beta and Windows Vista behaved when being used with solid state drives, in single drive and RAID 0 configuration.

The tests were carried out using the Patriot Warp 2 128GB SSD drive and Intel's ICH9R southbridge chipset; not an ideal setup but one which went on to prove how effective Windows 7 Beta is.

Tweaktown took care of performing the tests on "a fresh install of each operating system, furthermore no SSD specific performance tweaks were applied at all.

Windows 7 managed to beat Windows Vista in all tests, including Access time and CPU usage and it is likely that the final version of Windows 7 manages even better performance.

Some commentators though were quick to find faults in the testing configuration. Some said that the HD Tune benchmark on its own was not an effective way to benchmark storage performance and it would have been better to use more complex ones like the IOMeter.

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In addition, there are rumours that the Patriot Warp 2 SSD drive, which comes with a JMicron chip, has issues with writing. Tweaktown refrained from comparing the Patriot SSD against the likes of Western Digital's Velociraptor hard disk drives.

Obviously, the drive itself and the integrated RAID feature are major contributing factors to the performance; it is highly likely that dedicated SATA RAID cards like the Adaptec RAID 3805 controller and SSDs like Intel's X-25E Extreme would probably have performed better.

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