Upgraded to Hitachi 7k500 500gb and my windows Experience Score is the same as before?

Forum member "TChicken" has the same exact laptop as me the Toshiba M645-S4055. He still has the stock hard drive which is a 500GB 5400RPM hard drive. I upgraded my hard drive to the Hitachi 7K500 7200rpm 500gb hard drive and both our scores are the same in the Windows 7 Experience Score. Which is both at 5.9?

How is that? I not only upgraded from a 5400rpm to a 7200rpm. I upgraded to one of the faster 7200rpm in the market. How is his and my "Primary Hard Disk" scores the same?

 

windows 7 has locked the score of hard drives in Windows Experience Index at 5.9 This is because Windows does not like cache in the hard drives, and considers it "cheating".
Only SSD's can score higher then 5.9, unless you do some modifying of windows to ignore the cache on hard drives.

 

My 7K500 barely scores higher than my significantly-slower Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500GB 5400RPM drive in WEI. The bottom line is that WEI is a very poor performance benchmark, the scores vary so much from computer to computer.

CrystalDiskMark will show you the real differences in performance; download it here:
CrystalDiskMark - Software - Crystal Dew World

 

Just rolled six dice, average came out to 5.2 for your hard drive WEI score. Probably a bit more accurate than MS's tool too.

 

The most interesting part of WEI is trying to figure out whether there is any rationale behind the results. For example, changing my OS from 32 to 64 bit reduced the memory score from 7.2 to 6.8. Why?

John

 

Well obviously the 64-bit version can handle more gigs of ram (while the 32-bit version you were maxed out). So...They want you to buy more ram.

 

+1 lol.

 

While upgrading my HDs from the OEM 5400, to two 7K500 Hitachis did nothing to improve my WEI. However, upgrading and doubling my RAM did. Although my score was limited to a paltry 4.8 by my graphics?

Now then, what would happen to my WEI if I added a shiny new SSD...or two?

 

Krane, nothing would change for your WEI.

If your graphics are stuck at 4.8 - the SSD will not improve your overall WEI score.

The best you can hope for the disk data transfer rate for the Primary Hard Disk is 7.9 and that is 'at most'. My Inferno is rated at 7.5 in WEI.

 

WEI is a very inaccurate benchmark.. if u want a real benchmark , run PCMarkVantage or something.. i don't trust what WEI says.

 

I don't think it's as much the accuracy (whatever that means) as it is the consistency. WEI gives every Windows equipped computer a standard we can all compare to. In that, it's very accurate.

 

Not the HDD section, it is very inconsistent. My 7200.4, 320GB black, 7K500 and Momentus XT all scored 5.9. I can tell you they all had widely different performance in Windows 7 but all in WEI scored the same.............

 

Hmm once again in w7 the hdd score for mechanical hdds is locked at 5.9 as the highest score. Microsoft published an article about cache usi g hdds and the reason why they locked it at a lower score.

 

Even though your Windows Experience score for hard drive performance is 5.9 with both drives you should be able to tell the difference in performance between the 7200 and 5400 drives.

I use the Hitachi's 7200rpm drives for people who want to make their systems snappier without the cost of SSD's. All agree they can tell the 7200rpm drives have indeed improved system performance.

Most of the better 5400rpm drives I have tested fall into the 4.7 range. I did not know that Win 7 holds you at 5.9. Makes sense as I have never gotten over that with conventional drives.

 

Then what if I added one of these (OCZ’s Vertex 2 SSD) as a primary to the mix? Would it supplant that limitation of the 2nd HDD?

 

I am not sure if I am reading your question right, but the limits are not on a second drive, they are on any HDD. SSD's score higher, I have 2 drives, 5.9 on my Scorpio Black, 7.4 on my SSD.

 

Yes, that's what I mean. It's been stated that adding a second HDD does nothing for your score. However, once you replace your primary drive with an SSD that score should improve, right? My question is, is it additive?

 

Does the 250GB model of the Hitachi 7K500 have the same speed with reduced noise?
I love my 5K500.B single platter 250GB drive but it's 5,400rpm. I'm wondering if the single platter version of the 7K500 would also be silent.