Best Windows Experience Index - Hard Drive?

[scubasteve]

Like many others, I had great scores except for my drive...which was a 5.9. It's a brand new WD6401AALS 640GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb


It replaced a 74Gb Raptor...which I assume would have done better. Oh well, at the end of the day, this WEI is just a number. What matters is your real world experience...and my drive is zippy...and roomy.


BTW, I have another one for data, a third for live back of the data (external, separate power supply), and a fourth for offline backup...stored in a fireproof box...and WEI also gives me no extra credit for all that paranoia.

 

[myarmor]

Mine is 5.9 too.. with a most likely rather slow Western Digital WD15EADS 1.5TB Green Power.

Everything else but the processor is 7.6 (it is 7.4)

 

[RLevy]

Hello everyone.

I've a score of 6.3 with 2 x Seagate Cheetah 15K.6 RAID0

 

[nylonic48]

7.9 Secret

I get 7.9 on all . My set up is a sinclair spectrum 48k.
The secret is to use an high performance drive to 'up' your base score. I use a 3.5 inch floppy disk drive. When I use my external tape player the base score drops to an unacceptable 7.1
Sometimes if I hold the 'play' button down at the same time as the 'ffwd' button, I can achieve a 7.2

 

[patinhb]

7.9 Disk Drive Windows Experience Index

First post ... this seems to be a hot topic

My WIndows Experience Indexes

Disk Drive 7.9 (Corsair Force 120 SSD Raid 0 x4, with Intel Matrix Manager, 128k Stripe, 8096 Block Allocation), Previously 6.2 with 4 2.5" 500GB 7200 RPM Notebook HDD

Everything Else 7.8
CPU-Intel i7 980x (Liquid cooled Corsair H70)
Motherboard-Intel DX58SO OC at 3.6GHz
Memory-Corsair 6GB DDR3-SDRAM PC3-10700 (667 MHz) - [DDR3-1333]
Graphics-Diamond Radeon HD5870

Primary uses - Flight Simulation, Video and Photo Editing, Mathematical Analysis

Disk speed really improved Video editing experience, helped a little with Flight Simulation - primarily driven by CPU speed, no noticeable improvement in Mathematical Analyis use (using Wolfram Mathematica).

If you need high speed disk performance on the cheap (relatively speaking) use 2.5" 7200 RPM notebook drives in Raid 0. Limit primary partition to ~20% of the total amount available. This keeps the files on the outside edge of the drives - the fastest part. I used 400 GB of the 2TB available in my previous array. One warning - using only the outside edge seems to wear out the drives faster. But they are getting cheaper and cheaper ~$60 US each when they are on sale.

Also, don't rely on WEI or any other measure to measure the value to you. Set it up, try it out where you need the speed, if it isn't enough, take the next step - SSDs. I used notebook drives for a long time.

Conclusion - SSDs are good value for Video editing, not so good value for everything else but...as my wife says...you really do enjoy so go ahead and do it. Yes, I'm a lucky guy.

 

[tw33k]

Currently, the only single drive to get a 7.9 is the Crucial C300 SSD

 

[patinhb]

Thanks for the tip.

Have to admit...didn't even think about single drives. I was stuck in a Raid 0 mindset from the mechanical HDD experience. I'll have to get one of the Crucials, try it out and see if I can eliminate the Raid 0 array to reduce the risk of failure (I do back up every night to our Windows Home Server...but you never know.)

 

[Airbot]

Currently, the only single drive to get a 7.9 is the Crucial C300 SSD

Could probably get 7.9 with a single PCI-E drive, like a Revo.

 

[tw33k]

Could probably get 7.9 with a single PCI-E drive, like a Revo.

Yeah, maybe. I forgot about PCI-E drives

 

[Techymike]

This is the results after the reveodrive install.

 

[Airbot]

 

[delthibodeaux]

SSD Performance index drops from 6.6 to 5.9 after Windows 7 SP1 instal

I recently installed the new SP1 for Windows 7. My C Primary drive is a 64GB SSD. I looked at performance and it said new hardware detected. Actually no new hardware installed but recently I did have an external SATA drive plugged in to the eSata port for backup but this had been removed prior to the test

My index for primary disk was 6.6, but after I ran the refresh to retest and recalculate, the index changed to 5.9. Why could this be? The other indexes are in the 7.x and also may have changed but they are still in the 7.x. My homebrew has an intel core i7-920 quad processor with 12GB triple channel memory with ASUS X58 motherboard.

 

[Techymike]

Here is the results of the new Revodrive testing. THis is just crazy to see!

 

[Airbot]

Access time - 0.0 ms? You know that can't be right. Probably HDtune improper detection bugs. Makes you wonder how accurate it's results actually are there.
Not saying it's not that fast, but if there's one bug, bound to be others.

 

[NessPJ]

The 'false' detection might actually be due to the fact that the software simply can't handle latencies below 0.1 ms.
I've seen reviews however where Iometer, marks the drive pretty much on-par with Vertex latencies though (and a little slower in random 4 kb read cases).

 

[Techymike]

I ran it a few times and they are all the same at 0.0 ms. Shawn has the 160 GB but same card and his showed I think it was .083 ms.

 

[NessPJ]

Did you try Iometer?

Very nice nonetheless.

Though i have to admit... right now i have 2 x Intel X-25M G2 160 GB in RAID0 and the speed is great (504 MB/s).
I promised myself i would wait until the 1 GB/s barrier was crossed with either 2 SSD's in RAID0 or with an affordable PCI-e or other solution before i start buying something else.

 

[mikeyg06]

My system assesment

Heres a screen shot of my assesment
MobileMe Gallery

 

[ckershner]

With my Azus and 6 core amd Radeon with 6 monitors a SSD drive and two terabyte raid 0 drives I get:
Processor 7.5
Memory 7.5
Graphics 7.8
Gaming 7.8
disk transfer 7.5

Still haven't gotten to 7.9....

 

[Techymike]

Take the windows experience with a grain of salt! I never have and never will trust this program. I know for a fact it is not accurate and I feel it is some foolish tool by MS. I rely on what my PC does rather then what is told by this program! Just think of it as the a carrot in front of a horse!