HDD only gets a 7 rating of 5.9

Everlong18 said:

Tepid said:

I think almost all Sata Drives that are of good quality score a 5.9. All of mine do.
I have not seen any that were higher than 5.9

The WEI score would be good if they would actually use them for Games, certain software, etc.
Would make it easier for the average joe to determine if his system can handle it or not.
That was the original intent of the WEI score.

Yea Microsoft were all for just using a number system to determine whether or not a computer could run a game, but the system they put in doesn't exactly work well by going off the lowest score. Like Halo 2 PC uses this and you need a certain rating to be able to play it. A friend of mine tried it on his laptop, which is more than capable of playing games, but his HDD was just below what the overall score was, so obviously his laptop took this rating, and wasn't able to play it.

Yeah,, I forgot about that,, that was going to be my other point,, is that the game should never check this score at all. You should check it yourself and know your PC rating before purchasing a game, etc. But the software should not check it, so i do understand that

In other words,, if one purchases a game and it doesn't run on ones system due to lack of rating, then that is ones fault. As it is now, it would still be difficult to return the game once it has been opened.

But, enh,, new systems take time to work themselves out or fail.

Don't expect a mechanical hard drive to score any higher than a 5.9. My 150 GB Raptor only scores a 5.9 but since it performs great, it's not any sort of hindrance. Like others have said, a SSD would be required for anything higher, but I wouldn't worry. The Windows Experience Index score shouldn't be taken too seriously unless you're getting a REALLY low score.

Well yeah,, that's because on all modern PC's out in the last year or so are bottle necked by the Mechanical HDD.

Quite honestly, the fastest PC's out right now will never be faster than the Actual Hard Drive Read Speed.

if all the cables are sata and brand new drives it should be higher then a 5.9

It just will not happen - matter of physics. You need an SSD to get into the 7 range. An important factor is the access time, and that is just too slow on any HDD (about 15ms versus 0.1ms for an SSD).