Hard drive performance/rating different under Windows 7 than Vista?

Hello

I have a Vaio Z and i created a 30gb partition and installed Windows 7 on it; my other partitions include a recovery partition put on by Sony originally and the other is my Vista partition.

Anyway; my hard drive or disk assessment score under vista is somewhere around 5.5 however under Windows 7 is it around a 2.X. Why is there such a drastic difference? Is it because of how small i partitioned the drive?

I haven't tested any moving of files to see which is faster officially; but i just moved a 300mb file this morning and it seemed much slower in windows 7 than in vista.

Could it have something to do with my drive not using the ANCI drivers correctly under windows 7?


Thanks for any help

 

If you try this, it may improve your scores:

1. Control panel>hardware & sound>device manager
2. Under disk drives, find your main drive
3. Right click your main drive and select properties
4. Policies tab, uncheck the "enable write caching on this device"
5. Click ok, and re-run your WEI

 

I've seen that noted before, but curious, why would disabling write caching improve speed? I always enable it to increase speed, or atleast I always thought it did.

 

Most newer laptop HD's won't let you change this setting.

 

What drive do you have? My first Win 7 install was on a 5400rpm drive with no partitions, and it had a miserable 2.2 rating. My next install was on a 7200rpm drive in the third partition, and it scored a 5.8. It still seems a little low, but either MS has new thoughts about their ratings or the beta is flawed when it comes to rating the computer.

 

I personally think it's a bug in 7...mine's 2.9 as well

 

My 5400rpm, 160gb Fujitsu scored 5.2.

 

it's 320gb 5400rpm hitachi i believe, it was an ugrade through sony because it's a PITA to change one on the z so i opted for the upgrade

i'll test some data transfers and see if it's a bug

 

WD 320 Black Scorpio,

In Vista 5.8
In Win7 5.9

On a side note, my CPU went from 5.3 in Vista to 6.0 in Win7

 

my 250 GB 5400 RPM drive gets a 2

 

WD 320gb black scorpio

vista 5.6
windows7 5.8

 

I came across a Microsoft blog entry that better explains this. Full details are at http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/01/19/engineering-the-windows-7-windows-experience-index.aspx, but here’s the relevant technical explanation from the article:

An example problematic sequence consists of a series of sequential and random I/Os intermixed with one or more flushes. During these sequences, many of the random writes complete in unrealistically short periods of time (say 500 microseconds). Very short I/O completion times indicate caching; the actual work of moving the bits to spinning media, or to flash cells, is postponed. After a period of returning success very quickly, a backlog of deferred work is built up. What happens next is different from drive to drive. Some drives continue to consistently respond to reads as expected, no matter the earlier issued and postponed writes/flushes, which yields good performance and no perceived problems for the person using the PC. Some drives, however, reads are often held off for very lengthy periods as the drives apparently attempt to clear their backlog of work and this results in a perceived “blocking” state or almost a “locked system”. To validate this, on some systems, we replaced poor performing disks with known good disks and observed dramatically improved performance. In a few cases, updating the drive’s firmware was sufficient to very noticeably improve responsiveness.

To reflect this real world learning, in the Windows 7 Beta code, we have capped scores for drives which appear to exhibit the problematic behavior (during the scoring) and are using our feedback system to send back information to us to further evaluate these results. Scores of 1.9, 2.0, 2.9 and 3.0 for the system disk are possible because of our current capping rules.​

 

Vista


Windows 7 (enabled write caching)


Windows 7 (Disabled write caching)

 

dude I AM HAVING THIS SAME PROBLEM. everywhere else i went people thought i was crazy.

I have a Vaio Z540 and im running windows 7 64 bit. I get a 1.9 as my disk data transfer rate when it used to say 5.5 in vista 32bit.

 

hey BLINK is that article saying that we are performing faster then 7.9 which is the capped limit for windows 7 that it is just showing us a false number??

And can someone explain how disabling write caching is going to speed our performance up?

 

My understanding of the article is that they artificially capped HDs that exhibit poor behavior.

 

I get a 2 on my patriot warp v2 ssd haha

 

well my hard drive isnt crappy if its a 5.5 in the vista one

 

my hdd gets a 3 in win7 and something much higher in vista
also, my gpu scores somwwhat higher in win7

 

I have 2 X 300GB VelociRaptor's in Raid 0 and cant get a score above 5.9 with windows 7