Windows Vista Boot & Crysis Load Times

For this test we use disk imaging software to create an exact copy of the same Windows Vista Home Premium install on every hard disk drive before recording the time taken to boot from the BIOS logo screen and a working Vista desktop, using the Windows Vista Welcome Centre as the chequered flag.

Other than the Vista Welcome Centre, all other start-up processes were disabled prior to the imaging process. The boot time was recorded using a standard handheld stopwatch, with the test repeated five times and an average taken from the middle three results to produce the figures below.

We've retested a number of hard disk drives for our Crysis level load and Windows Vista boot time tests following some BIOS and boot optimisations to produce more accurate results. However, results are still recorded with a stopwatch, so even taking into account that we repeat tests multiple times, there's still a very slight margin of error.


The Corsair P256 proves itself extremely capable when booting Windows Vista, and marginally betters the Vertex to claim the top spot with a time of just 23.6 seconds from a cold boot to fully functional desktop. In comparison older JMicron based SSDs can take almost another ten seconds longer to boot the same install and even high performance hard disk drives take more than twice as long as the P256 to boot.

Crysis Boot Time

For this test we used our Crysis benchmarking tool to queue up a number of Crysis benchmark runs and again used the hand held stopwatch to record the time the test system took to load our time demo. We used multiple runs to collect five results for each drive, with the the lowest and highest load times discarded and the average taken from the remaining three results.


Loading Crysis however is a much more level playing field, and the difference between competing drives is less pronounced. Nevertheless, the Corsair again proved itself to be the fastest drive in real world applications, loading the our Core timedemo in a blistering 28.6 seconds.