Windows 7 is undoubtedly the most exciting new operating system to come out of Microsoft within the past decade--and with good reason. The user interface is superb, gone are many of the oddball Vista quirks, and the operating system is light and snappy, marking a massive 180 degree shift away from the heaviness and bloat of Vista. Despite the fact that it's based on many of the same core Vista elements, Windows 7 is a different beast, and should be looked at in a fresh new light.

As with any new operating system release, there are a lot of questions with regards to how it will perform on various hardware configurations--one of the more interesting ones being related to disk performance. So, today we're going to look at how various types of disks perform under Windows 7, both of the traditional platter based variety and new solid state disks. We're not only curious about how disk performance changes between the operating systems, but want to see if Windows 7's new solid-state specific optimizations and tuning give users even greater performance compared to Vista...