Why would my HDD be scoring so poorly in the Windows Experience Index?

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muffinz10

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I've just run Windows Experience Index and it seems that my HDD is causing a bit of a bottleneck to my overall system.

Here's a screenshot of the results:
http://img691.imageshack.us/img691/8956/19163213.jpg

Why would it be doing this? Could there be any other explanation than that I simply bought the wrong HDD? And if I did make a bad choice when buying it, what was wrong with it?

My HDD is:
Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB HD103SJ
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152185&Tpk=Samsung%20SpinPoint%20F3%201TB%20HD103SJ

The rest of my specs:
Intel Core i5 760
Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD4 Motherboard
EVGA GeForce GTX 460 1GB OC External Exhaust
G.Skill F3-12800CL9D-4GBNQ (2x2GB) DDR3


Does anyone have any suggestions?
 
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Welcome to Tom's Hardware...

Your system is running just fine and you hard drive is not a bottleneck. WEI is 1) a poor tool to "benchmark" your system and 2) more importantly in your case, design so only a SSD can pretty much score over 5.9. Mechanical hard drives max out at 5.9, no matter how fast the drive is.

If you want true "benchmarks", I would look at PCMark Vantage, 3DMark 11, HDTune... etc., which are designed to be truly a system benchmark.

tecmo34

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Welcome to Tom's Hardware...

Your system is running just fine and you hard drive is not a bottleneck. WEI is 1) a poor tool to "benchmark" your system and 2) more importantly in your case, design so only a SSD can pretty much score over 5.9. Mechanical hard drives max out at 5.9, no matter how fast the drive is.

If you want true "benchmarks", I would look at PCMark Vantage, 3DMark 11, HDTune... etc., which are designed to be truly a system benchmark.
 
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mavroxur

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Win 7's WEI is a crappy metric to gauge hardware performance. A 5.9 about as high as you can score on it with regular hard drives, no matter how fast they are. Only an SSD will go beyond that. Stupid, i know, but that's how it works. A WD green will get a 5.9. A pair of 10k velociraptors in a raid-0 will get a 5.9. One is obviously much faster, but.....meh whatever. Use something like Sandra or HDTune to really get reliable numbers.
 

mavroxur

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Not all SSD's are fast, and not all HDD's are slow. Granted, most SSDs are fast, but 10k and 15k drives aren't dead yet. Not until SSD prices come down to a level that meets their size and performance. But there's no reason the WEI should rank a WD Green and 2x velociraptors with the same score. A pair of VR's will burst over 400MB/sec and sustain like....over 200MB/sec. A WD Green struggles with 80MB/sec no matter what. Not to mention access times. The WEI is heavily skewed.

 

blackhawk1928

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^I agree...WEI isn't a good benchmark of your hardware. Not all SSD's are fast...I agree and not all HDD's are slow...I agree. However if you take the popular SSD's vs popular HDD's...it would be slaughter in all categories of performance by the SSDs.
 

mavroxur

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Performance SSD's versus performance HDD's is a no-brainer slaughterfest. I wish they'd loose the dumb WEI though, it just gives false impressions of performance (or lack thereof) where it's not warranted.
 

brian505

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Well, my problem is that my hard disk scores 5.9 AND it's a SSD disk!

I think that somehow Windows 7 is looking at my SSD and one of my hard drives. This is because when I want to go and do a Windows Backup, it wants to do a "system image of C: (the SSD) and E: (which is one of my other drives)."

There's no paging file on E: so I can't figure out how tell it to stop doing that. :(
 

supermancb

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What is interesting about this that I have a raid 0 setup with 5 drives for first raid parotion, 2 of the drives of the 5 drive raid setup are SSD from intel at a rated 3GB/S so combined should out put at 6GB/S, then of course adding on the output of the other 3 drives, at an average of 400MB/S which combines to 1.2GB/S So in theory shouldan't the index pick up the system is outputting at 7.2GB/S?. The other are 7200RPM hardrive 1 terabyte drives. What I do not understand is that i still only get a 6.4 in wei, even though data read and write is Flying well past combing just the 2 ssd's together. Any reason on why this would be happening?
 

PV9685

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This is a long-off reply but the last comment was also on a "dead thread". But forums come up in google so all replies can be useful down the road..

I think Microsoft probably skewed the numbers because of how THEY want memory to be used. Like we saw with the seemingly-useless-to-most ReadyBoost feature, Microsoft would like to use flash memory for virtual memory due to the random access times. This does make an enormous amount of sense since the typical home user could probably have a computer with 1GB of ram at the current moment and a reasonable SSD with the system partition and virtual memory on it and wouldn't notice the crippling effect of virtual memory the way it typically can be with mechanical drives.

Surely RAM is cheap enough half the time but it is still a great cost when you look at a corporation for example. At the current moment a 3 GHz Pentium 4 machine with Windows Vista/7/8 and 1GB of ram with a typical mechanical drive from that system's era is slow. Very slow. However, with a FAST hard disk the system is still quite responsive and with a DirectX 10 GPU can still accelerate the Aero interface and Flash/HTML5 content on the GPU. This means that such a low end system can be used for potentially 1,2, or even 3 extra years if the user can tolerate it!

In that light, the cost of an SSD is justifiable. It allows the usage of a lower end CPU and less ram, while not necessarily costing more for the 'disk' since the current concept is to put storage on a server/cloud instead of the local machine. The 5.9 maximum is stupid, I completely agree, though the concept of Microsoft considering mechanical drives as somewhat obsolete for the system/virtual memory kinda makes a bit of sense in comparison to a quality SSD.

But today, in 2012, I still prefer my mechanical drive for it's capacity :) But it's almost full :( (Now I'm waiting on Bluray burners to fall under $50 so I can offload my data.)
 

markdyer503

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Lol my scores all dropped from 7.9 ram score to 7.8, the ssd score dropped from 5.9 to 4.1, i restarted my computer, reran it, this time no new hardwear icon popped up even tho there hasnt been new hardwear in a week, all popped right back up, 7.9 for ram and 5.9 for my ssd,
 
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