A lot of the hype around Windows 7 is predicated on how well it'll run on modest hardware, especially SSD-equipped netbooks. It certainly feels faster than Vista, but HotHardware's battery of disk benchmarks confirms: it really, really is.

Their conclusion:

Platter based hard drives and high-end solid state drives, all run faster on Windows 7. Solid state drives see the largest performance boost, which showed up to a 35% improvement in read performance and up to a 23% boost in write performance.

They also found serious jumps in burst read performance, which explains why, given a general speed difference of about a third, Windows 7 feels so much quicker than Vista or XP. Obviously, they weren't testing the netbook edition, but I doubt this particular metric will differ between versions. Convinced yet? [HotHardware via Slashdot]

Send an email to John Herrman, the author of this post, at jherrman@gizmodo.com.