The newly released Windows 10 operating system provides a large number of interesting features making it one of the most anticipated versions
of the world's most popular family of operating systems. Besides new features and a refreshed user interface, the newly released operating
system promises more performance on older hardware platforms allowing users to upgrade to Windows 10 without purchasing new computers.
One of the most important performance aspects of an operating system is the disk performance, which impacts almost all computer operations
including the computer boot time, programs start times, documents load times, etc. The purpose of this performance review is to compare
the performance of Windows 10 disk I/O operations with a number of older operating systems including Windows 8, Windows 7 and Windows Vista.
Test Server Configuration
4-Core Intel CPU
16 GB of system memory
SSD disk for the operating system
SSD disk for disk performance tests
Intel Gigabit Ethernet network card
Tested Operating Systems
Windows 10 64-Bit
Windows 8 64-Bit
Windows 7 64-Bit
Windows Vista 64-Bit
In order to measure the disk performance of Windows 10 and compare it to the performance of Windows 8, Windows 7 and Windows Vista, we have
tested all the four operating systems on the same hardware platform and performed the following tests:
Small Files Copy Performance Test
Medium-Sized Files Copy Performance Test
Large Files Copy Performance Test
Disk Space Analysis Performance Test
File Classification Performance Test
Duplicate Files Search Performance Test
File Search Performance Test
File Delete Performance Test
All tests were performed using DiskBoss v5.9.18 (64-Bit), which is capable of performing different types of file copy, file synchronization,
disk space analysis, file classification, duplicate files search, file search and file delete operations. All the tested operating systems
were benchmarked using exactly the same set of files, in the same order and on the same hardware platform.
In order to easily compare different types of disk performance results, all results were normalized and an averaged, normalized disk performance
index has been calculated for each tested operating system. As it is clear from the disk performance results, Windows 10 provides significantly
better disk performance results in almost all types of tests.
For example, in our specific test configuration, Windows 10 disk I/O operations are 13.14% faster than Windows 8, 21.76% faster than Windows 7 and 40.96% faster than Windows Vista.
Windows 10 managed to improve the disk performance in almost all types of disk I/O operations, but unfortunately there is a slight performance degradation in disk space analysis
and file search operations.
In all types of file copy operations, Windows 10 delivers significantly better performance results. On average, Windows 10 is capable of copying files 25.55% faster than Windows 8,
46.59% faster than Windows 7 and 58.97% faster than Windows Vista.
On the other hand, in disk space analysis and file search operations, Windows 10 delivers slightly degraded performance results, which are approximately 10% slower
than the Windows 8, Windows 7 and Windows Vista operating systems.
In file delete operations, Windows 10 again manages to significantly improve the performance results and delivers a 40.05% improvement over Windows 8,
44.95% improvement over Windows 7 and a 46.14% improvement over Windows Vista.
* This performance review has been prepared for information purposes only and we strongly advise
you to make your own performance evaluations using your specific hardware components and datasets.
