Windows Vista Boot & Crysis Load Times

For this test we use 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've retested a number of hard disk drives for our Crysis level load and Windows Vista boot time tests following some BIOS and boot optimisations to produce more accurate results. However, results are still recorded with a stopwatch, so even taking into account that we repeat tests multiple times, there's still a very slight margin of error.


When it comes to boot times there's not much to choose between the Corsair P256 and the Indilnx based Falcon and Vertex SSDs, with all three posting times of around 24 seconds. In comparison to HDDs though this is an awesome result, with out Windows Vista Home Premium install booting in less than half the time it would take to do so on a 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.


The difference between HDD and SSD is less pronounced when loading a level in Crysis, but the Falcon still posts an extremely fast time of just 30 seconds, an improvement of twenty percent in comparison to a Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB.