Upgrading Your Notebook Hard Drive: Does It Make Sense?

Benchmark Results: Time For Startup, Hibernation, Shutdown

Finally, we also looked at the time required to start, hibernate, wake up, and shut down the test notebook.

The startup procedure wasn’t significantly faster, as the driver initialization and access times remained largely unchanged. In addition, we decided to add starting an offline version of the Tom’s Hardware Web site, complete with all of the components a Windows system loads before the user can actually start working.

The hibernation feature takes the entire contents of main memory and writes it to the hard drive for a later restore when you want to "wake up" the system. The new drive helps to save a few seconds. The duration of this procedure mainly depends on main memory size and contents.

We couldn’t track any performance benefit when waking the system from hibernation.

Shutting down the system was one second faster with the new hard drive.

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