How come I've changed from slower SATA2 HDs to faster SATA3 HDs, yet Windows 7's HD Performance remains the same at 5.9? I was hoping there would be a jump of some sort, but it remains the same. Wonder if it's worth the extra money to get SATA3 over SATA2 at the moment. What do you guys think?
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Windows 7's System Rating...
- Thread starter JCNiest5
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Joe Average
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Finishing the OP's thread title:
Windows 7's System Rating... is absolutely meaningless and useless in the long run and shouldn't ever be used as a way of doing any relevant system performance benchmarking or testing.
Seriously.
You will never get past 5.9 with a physical hard drive, period, it's really that simple. It's basically hardcoded into the WinSAT these days, and again, the entire concept of WinSAT is to give you an easy number for looking for games, etc. Instead of having to read the fine print on game boxes like year's past (what CPU minimum, minimum RAM, hard drive space, etc etc) that's all been replaced by the WinSAT scores.
If you find a game you want and it says your machine should be at least a 5.0 or something and you've got a machine that "performs" or gives a higher WinSAT score (note, it's a score, not a benchmark level) then you should be able to play that game with great performance, that sorta thing.
If you want > 5.9, get an SSD or two, that's the only real way it'll happen. If you want a reading of real world performance, try the standard benchmarks, not WinSAT, which is useless for such things and does more to confuse people or frustrate them just as it's done to you. WinSAT is not a benchmark, and shouldn't be used as such, or as a "goal" to shoot for - there are far better and more useful tools for such purposes.
My $.02...
Windows 7's System Rating... is absolutely meaningless and useless in the long run and shouldn't ever be used as a way of doing any relevant system performance benchmarking or testing.
Seriously.
You will never get past 5.9 with a physical hard drive, period, it's really that simple. It's basically hardcoded into the WinSAT these days, and again, the entire concept of WinSAT is to give you an easy number for looking for games, etc. Instead of having to read the fine print on game boxes like year's past (what CPU minimum, minimum RAM, hard drive space, etc etc) that's all been replaced by the WinSAT scores.
If you find a game you want and it says your machine should be at least a 5.0 or something and you've got a machine that "performs" or gives a higher WinSAT score (note, it's a score, not a benchmark level) then you should be able to play that game with great performance, that sorta thing.
If you want > 5.9, get an SSD or two, that's the only real way it'll happen. If you want a reading of real world performance, try the standard benchmarks, not WinSAT, which is useless for such things and does more to confuse people or frustrate them just as it's done to you. WinSAT is not a benchmark, and shouldn't be used as such, or as a "goal" to shoot for - there are far better and more useful tools for such purposes.
My $.02...
drescherjm
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I believe mechanical hard drives are clamped at 5.9 so no matter how fast of a mechanical drive you have you will not get a better WEI score than that..
WEI is a very poor benchmark. If you want to look at hard drive performance on windows I would first look at CrystalDiskMark and HT Tune.
heh.. that just shows AMD is better since my Phenom II x4 810 w/ 6850 gets 7.3..
/sarcasm off
I may as well post in this thread and see if anyone has any ideas. While I am fully aware that the windows 7 experience index is a generally useless benchmark, it did concern me last night when I happened across my current score for hard drive performance. I have a G2 Intel 80GB X-25M and the performance rating is 5.9?
I did some benchmarking and it seems to still be within spec, as well as downloaded the Intel SSD Toolbox and ran the diagnostics and it says it is fine. The only odd thing was when I went to run the SSD Optimizer it said it is unable to run it on a drive in a RAID configuration, but my drive is not set up in a RAID? Only thing I could think was that it is connected to the raid controller on my mobo, but I am fairly sure it isn't. Also, I have not changed anything hardware wise and the score used to be 7.8 for my SSD. Any thoughts?
I did some benchmarking and it seems to still be within spec, as well as downloaded the Intel SSD Toolbox and ran the diagnostics and it says it is fine. The only odd thing was when I went to run the SSD Optimizer it said it is unable to run it on a drive in a RAID configuration, but my drive is not set up in a RAID? Only thing I could think was that it is connected to the raid controller on my mobo, but I am fairly sure it isn't. Also, I have not changed anything hardware wise and the score used to be 7.8 for my SSD. Any thoughts?
Make sure trim is enabled. I can also tell you I had 2 x18m's in raid 0 & still only got a 5.9. The digging I did then was basically that without trim nothing goes above 5.9. My next setup was a single x25v in that same rig & it went to 6.4 & now 7.4 with my Vertex 2.. The overall fastest on the bench's were the original raid 0 config with the x18's, but the lowest score. So yea really take it with a grain of salt.
omniscence
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I think that the WinSAT score is mainly based on access time for which there is a lower limit for a given rotational speed and platter diameter. It can never be reduced below that value for normal harddrives.
The transition from SATA2 to SATA3 mainly increases throughput. No available harddrive can saturate SATA2 at the moment.
Make sure the SATA controller is set to AHCI mode and not RAID or IDE mode in the BIOS.
The transition from SATA2 to SATA3 mainly increases throughput. No available harddrive can saturate SATA2 at the moment.
Make sure the SATA controller is set to AHCI mode and not RAID or IDE mode in the BIOS.
I cannot confirm that the absence of TRIM limits the score to 5.9. My X25M G2 scored above 7 before and after the TRIM firmware update. It may however be related to NCQ.
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