Vista 64 - Windows Experience Index - low disk score

I've built a new Vista 64 system. Most of the hardware is new and fairly quick. I decided to reuse my old WD Raptors (2 x 74GB). When I run the Windows Experience Index test my system scores pretty well (5.9 for most categories) but only 5.6 for the disk category. This is a bit surprising as i'm using Raptors which are supposed to be fairly quick.

Here is a screenshot of the WEI result:

http://img100.imageshack.us/img100/8308/wei1no6.jpg

I've done a couple of disk improvement recommendations (turn off 8.3 filename generation in the Registry and disable indexing). Is a score of 5.6 the most i'll get with these Raptors and Vista 64? There are no unidentified bits of hardware as far as Vista 64 is concerned and I think I am using the latest drivers for everything.

It probably does it on disk space rather than speed. I've never checked up on it. The tests are pretty pointless anyway.

The general outlook on WD Raptors is 5.9 Vista Experience Index Base Score - Windows Just doing a scroll and everyone who has one is scoring 5.9.

So I dont think 5.6 is the most you can get :) There is hope. Have you tried running only one and doing the score?

is 5.6 such a big deal - no, not by a long shot.
performance can be controled by other factors, not just the physical drive.

Cables, the chipset on your motherboard, the drivers for said chipset, other devices hanging off cables, the space on the drive, how it is partitioned etc etc etc.

don't worry about it and just start using the PC, your PC is rated at 5.9 start enjoying it.

I have 2 x 200gb Maxtors in RAID 0 and get 5.9 so something is up there.

TBH though the Index scoring thing is a load of old bawls anyway.....Just ignore it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ikonia

performance can be controled by other factors, not just the physical drive.

Cables, the chipset on your motherboard, the drivers for said chipset, other devices hanging off cables, the space on the drive, how it is partitioned etc etc etc.

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Spot on.
The Windows Experience Index scores are actual results from benchmarking, not based on "free disk space" or "available memory", but their relative performance to standard tests.

In measuring disk performance you have to account for:
- physical disk(s) and cable(s)
- possibly slower devices on the same bus (lowest common denominator)
- (bus) connectors on the mainboard
- chipset on the mainboard
- BIOS configuration for bus/device operation mode
- chipset drivers for Windows
- disk controller drivers for Windows
- disk configuration in Windows (caching mode)
- other filter drivers installed in Windows (AV, open file agents, etc.)

Any issue or bottleneck caused by the list above cannot be resolved by tweaks to the OS file system.

That said, benchmarks are often synthetic results and the only real test is "user experience".

The purpose of the Windows Experience Index is to provide users with an idea of "can my computer meet the minimum or recommended requirements for software package X?".

quality as always Paul

Thanks for all the replies. I'm not too bothered by it but I just expected the Raptors to score 5.9 as every benchmark site i've seen seems to indicate. Hence I thought something must be wrong.

I did spot one thing that required a complete reinstall of Vista 64! Doh! I hadn't checked the BIOS carefully enough prior to my first install. The Intel controller was set to IDE mode and not AHCI mode. I wasn't able to just change the mode in the BIOS - this stopped Vista from booting. I had to do a fresh install of Vista with the BIOS setting set to AHCI before I started the install. Anyway, several hours later everything is back to normal...apart from the disk score is still at 5.6. I'll live with that. It might be down to me using two Raptors but the WEI only checks the primary drive anyway. It's just one of those irrelevant but niggling concerns...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Taz

Thanks for all the replies. I'm not too bothered by it but I just expected the Raptors to score 5.9 as every benchmark site i've seen seems to indicate. Hence I thought something must be wrong.

everything is back to normal...apart from the disk score is still at 5.6. I'll live with that. It might be down to me using two Raptors .

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Go back and re-read what Paul posted, its more than likley not down to the physical disk.

Why are people so hung up on the Vista Score thing? Its a load of rubbish.

One thing I did notice in Control Panel-->System-->Device Manager-->IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers was that my drives are running in MW-DMA Mode 2 and not in any UDMA mode. That's for both Raptors. Hence, I guess they are not running as fast as they can. I have enabled AHCI mode in the BIOS and installed the Intel Storage Manager drivers but the drives still run slow:

http://img529.imageshack.us/img529/2...tormodeso1.jpg

You are running them on IDE?
If not, are they set in the bios as IDE?

This is probably the problem.

^ I've set the controller mode to AHCI in the BIOS. However, the drives themselves are not showing up in the BIOS for me to configure the access mode. I think this may be a bug in the BIOS.

Okay, i've fixed that problem now. Both my Raptors are running in UDMA-6 mode. I did this by installing the latest Intel Matrix Storage Manager drivers. I hadn't done this before as every time I went to install them I was told that the ones I was installing were older than the already installed ones.

This time I went ahead and installed them anyway and found that the drives are now running in UDMA-6 after a reboot. One thing I did have to do was enable the performance options for each drive in System-->Device Manager as these options were disabled.

SiSoft Sandra now benchmarks the drives as expected even though my Windows Experience Index had gone DOWN very slightly from 5.6 to 5.5 for disk performance!