Multiple Hard Drives and the Windows Experience Index

Nanostronghold · 4 Oct 2010 at 19:11

Hi guys, this isn't all that important but I'd appreciate any insight. I recently upgraded my mediocre PC to a good one with one of the Overclockers bundles. Putting this stuff in my PC caused windows Vista to deactivate so I upgraded to Windows 7. Just out of curiosity I decided to check my Windows Experience Index and noticed that, unlike in Vista where my GFX card was the lowest scorer, My hard Drive was pulling the other scores down quite a bit. It was scoring a 5.9 which I know isn't too bad really.

I looked into it as it confused my that it was suddenly worse than my GFX card and It appeared to be the case that it was only testing my relatively bad old hard drive. It is a pretty low data rate one with small capacity that I got because at the time I was strapped for cash. I now have a second Hard drive that is 1Tb and has a higher data rate, although my OS is still installed on the slower one.

I was just wondering if there is any way to change it so that the "primary Disk Drive" that it tests is my other HDD. I install all games and stuff onto that anyway so it would be nice to get a value using that Hard Drive instead. So is there any way to change which hard drive it tests or is it stuck testing whichever hard drive your OS is installed on?

Thanks Guys.

Bob

setter · 4 Oct 2010 at 19:17

It wont make any difference to the windows index score im afraid, to see an increase your gonna need an ssd, i wouldnt pay much attention to the windows index score anyway tbh.

Nanostronghold · 4 Oct 2010 at 19:48

I don't entirely understand. I thought that the point limit in windows 7 was 7.9. My rubbish HDD gives me a 5.9, so surely my better drive would give me a better score wouldn't it?

I know that Windows index score doesn't mean much but I'm just curious as I know my other HDD is better, that's all.

setter · 4 Oct 2010 at 19:57

Any mechanical hdd will be the lowest scoring part in the system, like yourself im on a mechanical drive, (samsung f1 320gb), fairly modern 7200 rpm hdd which also scores 5.9, rest of the system is in the 7.7-7.9 range, to score any higher youll need a faster solid state drive.

Heres my own index score list

ooEy · 4 Oct 2010 at 20:00

I have 2 x Samsung F3 500GB in Raid 0, still get 5.9.

Nanostronghold · 4 Oct 2010 at 20:06

I find that bizzare tbh. I won't go for SSDs for quite a while in all likelihood. The stuff I use my PC for needs capacity and I don't think SSDs offer that right now. I just find it bizzare that they would put a cap like that on the score for an un-performance related reason. I know SSDs are faster, but my other hard drive is leaps and bounds better than my "Primary Disk Drive" and yet they both fetch the same score.

Crazy

Broken Hope · 4 Oct 2010 at 20:48

Nanostronghold said:
I just find it bizzare that they would put a cap like that on the score for an un-performance related reason. I know SSDs are faster, but my other hard drive is leaps and bounds better than my "Primary Disk Drive" and yet they both fetch the same score.

Crazy

It is a cap based on performance, mechanical HDDs are horrible at 4KB read/writes and random access, this is what pulls the score down so much, not the sequential read/writes.

If for some reason there was a mechanical HDD that was good at 4KB read/writes and random access then it would score higher than 5.9, it's not like they have written code to actually prevent mechanical HDDs from scoring higher.

413x · 4 Oct 2010 at 20:53

I only get 6.2 with 2 x wd velociraptor in raid 0.. one gets a score of 5.9

Rroff · 4 Oct 2010 at 20:55

Broken Hope said:
It is a cap based on performance, mechanical HDDs are horrible at 4KB read/writes and random access, this is what pulls the score down so much, not the sequential read/writes.

If for some reason there was a mechanical HDD that was good at 4KB read/writes and random access then it would score higher than 5.9, it's not like they have written code to actually prevent mechanical HDDs from scoring higher.

Even testing a short stoked 7200.12 HDD with a tiny partition I still only got 5.9 heh despite minimum sequential reads of 233MB/s and <6ms access times.

GoogalyMoogaly · 4 Oct 2010 at 21:09

Also to be fair, even if 1 drive was able to score higher than the other as it says the index is based on the lowest sub-score I would still expect the lowest scoring HDD to be the one used for the index score. And you shouldn't be able to pick which components it factors in or everyone would only use the highest scoring component surely?

Has anyone found anything that makes reference to the Windows Experience Index? For example in a system requirements section or anything?

Aricin · 4 Oct 2010 at 21:27

i just bought one of the 120gb vertex big foots and it replaced my old HDD (320GB Caviar SE16 SATA 300) as windows drive.

My windows experience index on the hard drive went from 4.3 to 7.5. I didnt expect that kind of jump.

But I would also say to take the windows experience index with a grain of salt. Its not the end of all things etc.

Broken Hope · 5 Oct 2010 at 07:03

Rroff said:
Even testing a short stoked 7200.12 HDD with a tiny partition I still only got 5.9 heh despite minimum sequential reads of 233MB/s and <6ms access times.

Because the drive still has horrible 4KB reads/writes.

If you run winsat -disk in an elevated command prompt you can see how it scores each area of disk performance and where mechanical drives let the score down.