Microsoft made some bold claims back at the WinHec Conference about Solid State Drive (SSD) performance boosts in Windows 7. It only took a week after the release of the Windows 7 Beta before the first benchmarks appeared on websites. Tweaktown for instance published benchmarks about SSD performance in Windows 7 compared to Windows Vista Service Pack 1. SSD performance was tested both in a single drive and RAID setup using Patriot Warp2 128GB SSD SATA drives. Tests were run on 64-bit versions of both Windows 7 and Windows Vista Service Pack 1. Both read and write speeds were tested with HD Tune Pro.
The average read speed was 3-5 MB/s higher in Windows 7 than it was in Windows Vista Service Pack 1 while maximum read speeds were up to a maximum of 10 MB/s. While that is not a lot for a drive with read speeds of more than 100 MB/s.
Write speeds were more interesting. The average write speed of the drives in Raid 0 was 10 MB/s higher in Windows 7 than it was in Windows Vista with a write speed of 71 MB/s compared to 61 MB/s in Windows Vista. The different was only 1 MB/s on the other hand for single SSDs.
It should be noted that drive performance could increase further since Windows 7 is still a beta release and not a final one. The right drivers could increase the read and write performance of Solid State Drives in Windows 7 further.
