Windows XP Startup & Application Loading

Windows XP is the old dinosaur of operating systems still used on desktops today, it was released in October 2001, that’s closing in on 8 years and it’s still going strong (64% of PCs in the world still run XP according to a study done in February 2009).

While SSD is a brand new technology, created long after the Windows XP OS, it’s important that this new hardware works correctly with this major Windows release. This OS does a bit less of pre-fetching and caching than Vista/7 but there are still a few tweaks you can do to make it work better with SSD devices.

So how does the OCZ Vertex cope with Windows XP? Let’s watch and find out.

The embed movie from youtube already has HD mode enabled, if you click the fullscreen button you can view the original 1280x720 HD source.



Startup of Windows XP goes pretty fast on the SSD, the Windows logon prompt shoots by but then it seems to pause for a while, the HDD powered D630 seems to catch up at about 30 seconds into the movie… but then the SSD continues with a blistering fast loadup sequence of all the Office applications (and even 3D pinball), Outlook 2007 takes a bit longer than on Vista, but still fluent, after approximate 1:17 the system with the OCZ Vertex has stopped loading.. the other D630 takes another minute before it catches up.

On these portables Office 2007 runs so-so, Outlook especially is very I/O intensive, especially with larger PST/OST files; while not shown in the movie, I did some tests with help of a colleague to navigate and use Outlook side by side on both machines, searching through 1.2+gb PST file, just listing ALL emails took about 3-5 seconds on the SSD powered system, the D630 with 7200rpm HDD took 20-30 seconds to list them all. Opening a large email with some Excel, PDF and Word documents goes about equally fast on both machines, but opening those attachments is again a world of difference, I’m not exaggerating if I said the SSD did it 5x faster.

So while the SSD offers some blistering fast read and write speeds, these speeds can be matched by some high end conventional HDDs in a RAID array; sequential read/write is not very hard for a hard drive, SSD has it easy there too; where the two differ the most is random read/write speeds; and it’s this difference which make the Laptop with the OCZ SSD so fast; sure its maximum read/write speeds are higher, but it can read data stored randomly on the drive with latencies below 0.1 millisecond. A hard drive on the other hand has to move its mechanical read/write head over the platters to do the same thing, at best you get 7 millisecond access times, but the SSD keeps it below 0.1ms with random I/O, the HDD has 7ms only with sequential, throw a bunch of random I/O at it and performance will suffer tremendously.

To demonstrate this I used the Windows XP setup, loaded up a full disk virus scan with McAfee and ran the HD Tune HDD benchmark at the same time; this is READ only test; McAfee is accessing all the files on the hard disk, checking them for viruses, these files are stored on different locations on the disk, the HD Tune benchmark does a simple sequential read test over the whole disk.

The embed movie from youtube already has HD mode enabled, if you click the fullscreen button you can view the original 1280x720 HD source.



You’ll want to look at the minimum read speeds achieved on both systems, as well as the progress made by the virus-scan, it’s a bit longer than the other movies this one; no need to sit it out, unless you want to.. cutting to the chase:

Hitachi 7200rpm 2.5” HDD: min: 3.7Mb/s, average: 31.2mb/s, Access time: 21ms

OCZ Vertex 2.5” SSD: min: 88.7Mb/s, average: 162.4Mb/s, Access time: 0.1ms

The SSD lowest value is still 3 times faster than the HDD average. The HDD min speed is 24 times lower than that of the SSD! Access time on the SSD remain at 0.1ms, the HDD is all over the place, averaging at 21ms, while double that value can also be observed.

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I summed up what I think of the OCZ Vertex SSD on the last page, but it’s worth repeating: This drive (or the Intel X25 if you can spare the money) is the single most important system upgrade you can do in 2009.

Hope you found this article interesting. For the more high-end enthusiasts out there, we have an article lined up comparing SSDs in RAID, versus multiple Gigabyte I-Ram and a 5.25” device which can hold DDR2 sticks; 350Mb/s+ transfer speeds ahead!