Best Windows Experience Index - Hard Drive?

[landozelig]

I'm curious to see what kind of numbers people have gotten for the primary hard disk data transfer rate. Under Vista I scored 5.9 on all tests as it was as high as the numbers would go.

After a clean install of Win7 Ultimate, I was quite surprised to find my primary hard disk score remained at a 5.9. My boot drive is made up of 2 10,000RPM cheetah SATA drives in a RAID stripe (RAID0). I'm wondering if this test is still maxed out at 5.9. If you got higher than 5.9, what kind of drive are you using? I'm sure SSD's score higher.

Cheers.

 

[oldspook]

I'm curious to see what kind of numbers people have gotten for the primary hard disk data transfer rate. Under Vista I scored 5.9 on all tests as it was as high as the numbers would go.

After a clean install of Win7 Ultimate, I was quite surprised to find my primary hard disk score remained at a 5.9. My boot drive is made up of 2 10,000RPM cheetah SATA drives in a RAID stripe (RAID0). I'm wondering if this test is still maxed out at 5.9. If you got higher than 5.9, what kind of drive are you using? I'm sure SSD's score higher.

Cheers.

I also did a clean install of Win7 Ultimate and scored 5.9 for my HDD. My boot drive is Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000HLFS 300GB 10000 RPM. One of the fastest SATA hard drives made.

 

[landozelig]

I also did a clean install of Win7 Ultimate and scored 5.9 for my HDD. My boot drive is Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000HLFS 300GB 10000 RPM. One of the fastest SATA hard drives made.

That's why I'm thinking it may be capped at 5.9 as it was in Vista - or you need a SSD to go past it.

 

[Airbot]

It's not capped at 5.9. Every section of the assessment can reach 7.9, but like you say, you'd need a ssd to reach higher levels pretty much. It just doesn't seem to go higher than that for HDDs. I've seen some that have it, not sure where, but this thread is the place to look.

http://www.sevenforums.com/performance-maintenance/342-show-us-your-wei.html

 

[landozelig]

7.9? Dang, I need to do some upgrades

 

[Airbot]

7.9 is the max level with Windows 7. Unlike 5.9 max in Vista.

 

[s matthews]

Custom built rig and getting higher than 5.9 boys!

Read all this and interested to know about scores so setting a benchmark. My spec is

Windows 7 Home Premium
Core i7 965 Extreme @ 3.68GHz
12 GB DDR3 RAM 1600 GHz
Nvidia GTX 295 X 2 Quad Sli
OCZ Vertex 128GB SSD - Boot Drive
300GB Velociraptor 10,000 RPM
1TB Samsung 7,200 RPM
Silverstone TJ07 Water cooled rig

Scores in Windows Experience Index

7.6
7.7
7.9
7.9
6.6 Hard Disc

Overall score 6.6 improved from 6.4 after cleaning SSD and installing some old software.

Cheers boys beat this!

 

[Airbot]

Nice specs s matthews. Welcome aboard.

 

[Shockwave]

My vertex that I bought( and returned for a agility instead to save $100 plus get the same performance) gave me a 7.2 on build 7600 last week. The agility and official windows 7 should be in later this week.

 

[pparks1]

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.

 

[jimbo45]

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

 

[Magnus101]

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...

 

[AntiSilence]

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

 

[s matthews]

Tweaked again !

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

 

[landozelig]

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.

 

[raboot]

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

 

[SupeRak]

Windows 7 allows for more upto date equipment than Vista in determining Experience Scores.
To this end, scores 6.0 to 7.9 have been 'created'.
The Primary Hard Disk score is calculated slightly differently - as mentioned earlier in this thread.
I think the Hard Drive score is the most difficult to get up to 7.9, for example my scores are:

• 7.6 for processor (I have reduced my overclock because of stability issues with release version of Professional until I upgrade my watercoooling - I was on 7.8 on RTC)
• 7.9 for memory, graphics and gaming graphics
• 7.2 for primary hard disk

I was on 7.1 for hard disk until I turned on AHCI - I have not tried any other 'tweaks'
For info, my primary HDD is a 128G Gen2 Corsair SDD - I am using 300GB 15000rpm Fujitsu SAS for applications and 1TB WD for storage; 3 x 2GB 2000MHz Corsair Dominator GT (at 1850MHz 8/8/8/24 timings); 2 x stock Gainward nVidia 295; watercooled i7 920 at 3.885 GHz (was on 4 GHz with Win 7 Ult RTC)
Oddly enough, I have had other - non-CPU related - stability isues with the release version of Win 7 Pro (UK). I will be investigating and reinstalling soon when time allows. RTC was 100% solid on the same system (NEVER had that with an MS o/s before) - I must have a bad install.
Hope this is useful...

PS - I'm not blaming windows for my needing to reduce my overclock. That is much more likely to be a system issue.

 

[AussieGuy92]

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

 

[thefabe]

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

 

[Magnus101]

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!