Windows Vista Boot & Crysis Load Times

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 handheld stopwatch, with the test repeated five times and an average taken from the middle three results to produce the figures below.


We were worried that the 2TB Caviar's high random access time and slow spindle speed would affect its real world performance and that certainly seems to be the case. Despite its enormous 500GB platter density, it takes 74.5 seconds to boot Windows Vista Home Premium - over 10 seconds longer than the Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB!

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.


Booting Crysis was even more disappointing and the 2TB Caviar Green is the single slowest drive we've tested in this particular test, taking a whopping 43 seconds to load our benchmark run.