Best Windows Experience Index - Hard Drive?

Hi there
It's not only the HDD drives themselves but also the controller and how this reacts with the rest of the system - such as Bus speed, I/O caching, data "pre-fetch", etc etc.

You could put the fastest I/O controller in the universe on your system but if the bus I/O throughput on the mobo (chipset etc) can't supply / acquire data from the application quick enough then that's all you are going to get.

5.9 is probably more than adequate for 99% of your apps anyway.

SSD's are another animal completely especially with TRIM support -- you should be able to reach > 7 with these.

Cheers
jimbo

I actually think the new experience index is much more balanced than the old Vista one, that gave a modest system 5.9 (maxed out) even in 2007 when Vista was just out.
And the fact that fast SSD-drives have arrived since then has made it harder to get a high score for the hard drive, which is good since it probably is the thing that is holding back most half decent systems these days. For me, for example my score is still 5.9, but now the rest of the system gets 7.3 for all aspects(which seems a little bit strange, almost made me think it was capped if I hadn't seen others getting better scores).
My plans for an upgrade before seing this index score was to buy an Intel X25-M G2 80 GB when the price has fallen to acceptable levels.
So in that regard, the index is right.
Wonder how many of the faster SSD;s that will be sold as a consequence of the new index? I guess that the majority of users PC;s will be held back by the hard disk in the score if they haven't got an SSD-drive.
Let's hope for that to happen, since the prices for SSD;s like the X25;s will drop as the manufactured volumes goes up...

Mine is 5.9 for my Maxtor SATA drive. Didn't have Vista so can't say what it would have been in that.

Have done some tweaking and checking removing old stuff and now the scores have changed!

The hard disc has gone from 6.4 to 6.5 and now 6.9 - wait to see if drivers effect this!

si

Like Jimbo said, it's got to be my controller or something holding back my score. I don't see how 2x 10K Cheetah drives RAID striped remain at a 5.9. It's probably something to do with the SATA RAID controller more than the drives. I'm sure if it was SCSI instead of SATA it would have jumped up a bit.

On the other hand, these numbers have lost some meaning for me as I installed Win7 in VMware Fusion on a MacBook Pro with a 7200rpm standard drive and it reported a score of 6.6 - so I'm not sure how these scores are being calculated.

Hi... 2 V-Raptors in RAID0 gives me 62. At first it was 63, then a recent re-run gave me the 62.

worst system specs but not bad for a intel celeron processor with 3gb ram

pparks1 said:

7.4 with my Intel X25-M Gen 2 drive. This was before the firmware upgrade which incuded TRIM support and faster sequential write performance. Will have to check at some point to see if that made any change to the results.

Now this is VERY impressive. WOW. My system is right up their with you till it comes to the hard drive 4.5

stillfreefilms said:

worst system specs but not bad for a intel celeron processor with 3gb ram

Now, that score shows how wrong this index is.
How on earth can the graphics card be weaker for aero than games? 2.2 vs 3.3 according to your score.
I just can't see that aero would demand more from your graphics card than Crysis! That is ridiculous!