Windows Experience Index Subscore

nick.lidgett · 4 Mar 2012 at 09:56

Hi guys i have just done a clean install of Windows 7 Ultimate Edition on my computer and after i installed all the up to date drivers i ran the Windows Experience Index to get a score. Everything came back above 7.6 except the score for the primary disk which came back 5.9.

My primary hard disk is a Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB SATA 6Gb/s 16MB Cache. Does anybody have one of these that can verify my results or if you dont have one and are familiar with the W.E.I scoring system does this sound like a reasonable score.

Is there anything i can do to improve this subscore without changing the drive, i did read about some software called Intel Rapid Storage but i am not sure if i need it or if it would make any difference my motherboard is an Asus P8P67 PRO Intel P67 B3 REVISION, i am not sure if this will help anybody answer my question but it might be helpful.

Thanks in advance.

Lordgrayone · 4 Mar 2012 at 10:03

WEI is a complete fail, ignore it and do a proper test.
Im sure it's running fine though

Surveyor · 4 Mar 2012 at 10:12

5.9 is the highest possible score for a single HDD in the WEI.

Scores above that are reserved for RAID setups (but then only low 6's) and SSD's (up to 7.9).

nick.lidgett · 4 Mar 2012 at 10:45

Surveyor said:
5.9 is the highest possible score for a single HDD in the WEI.

Scores above that are reserved for RAID setups (but then only low 6's) and SSD's (up to 7.9).

So a single SSD can achieve a score above the low 6's or RAID SSD's (that would be pricey eh? lol)?

I am looking at getting a SSD but i was waiting for Windows 8 and do them both together, what do you reckon?

Surveyor · 4 Mar 2012 at 10:48

nick.lidgett said:
So a single SSD can achieve a score above the low 6's or RAID SSD's (that would be pricey eh? lol)?

I am looking at getting a SSD but i was waiting for Windows 8 and do them both together, what do you reckon?

It's all pretty meaningless but I've seen HDD's in RAID 0 setups achieve a score of 6.1.

SSD's can score up to 7.9 individually or in RAID.

If you want an SSD there's no reason to wait for Windows 8, just re-use it as and when you get Windows 8.

FallshirmjAEger · 4 Mar 2012 at 14:57

Ignore WEI. I only use it when updating drivers etc to check if the score was the same as before the update (Incase the update borked something)

wazza300 · 4 Mar 2012 at 16:09

all mechanical drives whether sata2 or sata3 will score max of 5.9 in wei,maybe if in raid 0 they will score a little bit higher but not as high as an ssd

TAC4U · 4 Mar 2012 at 17:41

While WEI is indeed virtually worthless, there is a reason it considers HDDs a bottleneck and that's because they are. It is definitely worth getting an SSD for a boot drive. The price of a 100GB+ drives is lower than it has ever been and the performance they provide is excellent. I'd highly recommend going for a 120GB drive, as that's pretty much the sweet spot for a Windows drive - drives like the ADATA S510 or Corsair Force Series 3 can be had for less than £130. Sure that may be a lot when a 3TB drives costs about the same but it really does improve overall system performance.

There's no point waiting for Windows 8 to get an SSD.