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.


As the VelociRaptor occupies that middle ground between capacity mechanical drives and SSDs it's hardly surprising to find its Vista boot time is squarely in between the two kinds of drives, knocking a solid eight seconds off of the Samsung F1 1TB's time but still lagging over eighteen seconds behind even the slowest SSD.

This is all down to the access times, as booting a PC requires the hard disk to read many small files. With their almost instant access times, the field of SSDs turn in almost identical results while the chasing field of mechanical drives are separated by access times, with the Raptor's 10,000RPM drive speed allowing it to demonstrate a clear but not exactly mind blowing advantage.

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.


Just as with the Vista boot test, the VelociRaptor finds itself squarely between the mechanical drives and the SSDs when it comes to loading Crysis, with an average time of 34.6 seconds 2.5 seconds faster than the Samsung but a full four seconds slower than the slowest SSD.