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.


Wow! Thanks to it's excellent read speeds, which have been apparent throughout our testing, the Seagate 7200.12 1TB proves to just as quick when booting Windows Vista, shaving over five seconds off the Samsung Spinpoint F1's time and booting Vista just 2.5 seconds slower than the 10,000 RPM Western Digital Raptor! Previously we've been somewhat disappointed by Seagate drives real world performance but that's certainly not the case here - it's an absolute stormer.

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 time the Seagate 7200.12 1TB proves to be very quick when loading Crysis too. A time of 36.6 seconds pips the Samsung Spinpoint F1 by just half a second but while the margin of victory isn't enormous, it is there, clearly putting the Seagate drive ahead in the real world performance stakes.