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.


Despite excellent performance thoroughout our sequential read and random read tests, the Torqx and the latest v1571 firmware seemed to be a little slower when booting Windows, than the previous firmware equipped Vertex and Falcon drives. The resultant boot time of 24.5 seconds is still incredibly quick though, and the performance drop of 2.5% is hardly anything to get upset over.

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.


For some reason loading games doesn't produce quite the performance gap between SSDs and HDDs as booting windows does, but nevertheless the Torqx performs well with a level load time of 29.4 seconds, over seven seconds faster than a 1TB HDD. However, the Samsung drive controller powered Corsair P256 is notably a full second faster than the Indilinx drives here, even with the latest v1571 firmware.