Why does my disk speed in Windows score so low

So I have a 10k raptor drive for my boot drive. My friend has an off the shelf 7200rpm drive that is a couple years old. Why does he get a 6.9 in Windows 7 performance score and mine only clocks in at 5.9? I have a newer system than him as well.

It likely is just a matter of the weight MS has assigned to each individual drive attribute. While your Raptor may have better seek times, his 7200rpm drive likely has higher throughput because of higher platter density (you do not specify the size). The Windows 7 experience scores are somewhat arbitrary and useless anyways...

Is that 10K Raptor an actual Raptor and not the newer VelociRaptor, first or second generation? If it's the original Raptor - the 36GB model from years past, or even the 74GB that came out - most modern 7200 rpm models (up to 3-4 years old) will smoke it for outright sustained read and write speeds. Having 10,000 rpms is nice but, those original and even the second generation Raptors were still pretty bad compared to what larger capacity drives can do in terms of pure throughput.

Raptors and VelociRaptors were "faster" because of their random access speeds, not particular because of the actual rotational speeds. Your friend's hard drive is most likely cranking out far more sustained megabytes per second on reads and writes than the Raptor is capable of hence the higher score.

Access time is one thing, sustained reads and writes are another, so... it's just how the "scores" work out.

Besides, the WinSAT isn't supposed to be used as a benchmark even in spite of nearly everyone trying to do that very thing.

Use something like HDTune or HDTach to get actual hard results you can compare - you'll find the Raptor falls behind what the other drive can do, I'll bet, in terms of it being slower for raw transfer speeds. Access times will be lower, of course, but the 7200 rpm will provide more data faster overall.

I have the new velociraptor. I dont really care to beat his score I just wanted to know why mine would clock in so slow. If the raptor isnt helping me then maybe I should just dump it and get a standard 7200rpm drive.

You're getting stuck in the mindset I just explained you shouldn't: WinSAT is not a benchmark, it's not of any use to anyone if you're actually concerned with how well your machine is actually working.

Use a real hard drive benchmark in that respect - Microsoft chose their own algorithms and methodology for that WinSAT score generation; it's not relevant to the real world, it's only purpose is to give consumers a general ballpark for deciding on if a game is capable of adequate playability on their machines.

That's what WinSAT was designed for: instead of the good old days where someone had to read the actual hardware recommendations on the box of a game they were interested in, all the fine print, the WinSAT is supposed to make that easier.

Pick up a box, it says "For best play, you should have a machine with at least a <x> rating" and if your PC is > <x> you're all set, for the most part.

VelociRaptors are damned fast drives, and arguably they outperform any 7200 rpm hard drives on the market in terms of sheer desktop performance, but there's more to it than just a number. You'd have to run actual benchmarks to get real performance data to make a decision.

Want a snappy fast highly responsive system? The VelociRaptors are the best physical hard drives for that purpose.

Want a fast system that gets the job done but isn't quite as snappy and responsive, like when you click it takes a bit longer to open an app, or a video, etc? Still fast but not as fast? That's where regular 7200 rpm drives come in.

Besides, the VelociRaptors are very expensive on a per-gigabyte cost comparison. 300GB VelociRaptor = $200 or so even today, the 600GB model a bit more, compared to 1TB 7200 rpm drives for $55 or less, 2TB for $90 or less, and very similar performance in terms of sustained reads and writes but not in access times which is where that snappy responsiveness comes in.

Gotta run real benchmarks to find that sort of thing out. It's a VelociRaptor, nobody is going to call it "slow" and be able to back that claim up since they are very fast hard drives.

Take a step back and look at all the variables, do the benchmarking and then decide. Personally, I'd use a VelociRaptor as a boot drive with some storage of frequently accessed apps, and get a large capacity secondary drive to use for a secondary page file to increase overall system multitasking as well as just having a shitload of free space to use.

It's all up to you...

Lots of stuff can affect hard drive benchmark. The Velociraptor is faster than any of the larger 7200 rpm drives from 3 years ago. Stuff like having background tasks running, your motherboard's sata controller and chipset drivers, all that stuff will affect certain performance metrics. Heck I've heard of spotty sata cables causing drastic performance issues with some SSD's and hard drives.

Thanks for the tips everyone. I appreciate it. Makes more sense to me now.

I read somewhere that WinSAT only gave scores higher than 5.9 to SSD's, and so far, be it a WD black, Samsung F4 or WD Velociraptor I've never seen them score higher than 5.9.

Did they change that, or is it simply a coincidence??? By the way, I never checked a hdd Raid 0 array's score, so what I read is possibly wrong

Well my dual WD 1TB Blacks in Raid0 only score 6.1.

my WD Caviar Black 640 GB scores a 5.9 while my single 256GB SSD scores a 7.3

If it makes you feel better, my Vraptor scored 5.9 as well. My Intel G2 scores a 7.7 though, so I'm feeling better about that.

Funny that my CPU and Ram are now the bottleneck according to the WinSAT score.