hIOmon SSD Performance Monitor - Understanding desktop usage patterns.

[Ao1]

Regarding my HDD vs SSD bootup metrics
The F3 boots in about 21-22 seconds (using boottimer) and so the period to monitor could easily have been set to 60 seconds (or less), I don't think that would have changed anything, that is unless there were some random scheduled activities that started during the monitoring period. (i.e. windows update, AV scan, ...)
Like you've already mentioned, it's all down to when the monitoring starts.
Both the SSD and the HDD are capable of reading/writing TBs of data during the 2 minute monitoring period so that's a moot point wrt to comparing total i/o during bootup.
Looking at the idle/busy time percentages confirms that most of the time it's just idling during the 2 minute period.
(and that the idle part is in favour of the SSDs )

I found with HDD that there is a BIG difference between Windows first appearing and being fully loaded. With HDD you can hear the drive clunking away well after Windows first appears and if I made the test period less than 2 minutes I could not get a comparable data load.

Not related but when I used hard raid with cache it appeared that Windows reports cache speed. It reports that data is transferred when in fact the data is still being transferred from cache to the hard drive. That is one benefit of HDD; you can listen to what is going on.

I'm really looking forward to seeing your analysis with VM's