Windows Vista Home Premium 64-Bit Boot Time

For this test we used 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 hand held stopwatch, with the test repeated five times and an average taken from the middle three results to produce the figures below.


Our Window's Vista boot time test really did sort the men from the boys, with overall drive speed, drive density and platter size all impacting on the mechanical drive's performance and the SSDs able to do what they do best - very fast reads. The results speak for themselves, with the SSDs all booting to the Vista desktop in under 40 seconds and twice as fast as the 1TB and 10,000RPM mechanical hard drives. What was really disappointing here though was how slow the 250GB single platter drive was to boot, taking almost three times as long to boot to a usable operating system.

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.


Load times in Crysis are significantly improved using all three SSDs, with a drop of over eight seconds in comparison to the Western Digital Raptor and over ten seconds faster than the 1TB Seagate triple platter drive. However, unlike in the individual file transfer tests, the significantly more expensive Intel X25-M is unable to demonstrate any sort of big lead over the cheaper SSDs, with all three posting results of within a second of each other.