Windows 7 Preformance index score

[GTSRboy]

Here is my Windows 7 performance score. Why exactly do i have a 3/7.9 for my hard disk? Ive got as new, 90% free Seagate 7200rpm at 250GB capacity running win 7 32 bit. I think these windows performance scores arnt a good way to measure preformance..my base score is now a '3.0':rolleyes:

http://img149.imageshack.us/img149/7261/testxd8.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
http://img149.imageshack.us/img149/testxd8.jpg/1/w827.png (http://g.imageshack.us/img149/testxd8.jpg/1/)

[XS Janus]

That hard disk IS crap, by todays standards.
But I agree base score shouldn't be determined by lowest score.

On notebooks it is almost always determined by 3d graphics performance that isn't important at all for notebooks. Silly...

[reberto]

That hard disk IS crap, by todays standards.
But I agree base score shouldn't be determined by lowest score.

My score was exactly the same with my 2.5 drive on a fresh install, some Windows 7 installs have hard drive usage issues. For the first hour after I boot my hard drive activity light was on and never even blinked.

[ewitte]

I've gotten as high as 7.1 off 3 SSD drives in RAID0.

[{GOD}Raptor22]

Wow, my spare 120GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10 gets a 5.2... :shakes:

[GTSRboy]

What kind of drive would get a better score? What determines a drives transfer rate...the rpm?

[ExodusC]

My 4x74GB Raptors in RAID 0 only pull a 5.9-- what the hell.

They do 250 MB/s sustained read speeds, what more do they want?

[Speederlander]

My 4x74GB Raptors in RAID 0 only pull a 5.9-- what the hell.

They do 250 MB/s sustained read speeds, what more do they want?

People can get a GB/s with a RAIDed array, they need a lot of headroom. ;)

250 MB/s can be had with a single intel SSD.

[Warboy]

there is already a thread about this in the OS section.

[ptelles]

My SSD is rated at 6.3.

http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff29/808AWD325xi/oc/win7_wei.jpg

[YMAA]

3 74GB Raptors gets a 5.9. Bar seems to be set pretty high for mass storage.

[ewitte]

I'd have a 7.1 overall if they released WDDM 1.1 drivers that work with the 285. Thats my disk score. CPU/MEM 7.5 and Aero 7.9

[XS Janus]

Guess what I have 5.5 for my 2.5" Seagate 7200rpm! :D Sounds strange to me...

Judging by the score headroom... MS knows something we don't about storage speed! :D

[NaMcO]

Im curious anyone have a Western Digital WD640AAKS and got a score on this OS ?

I have, but on a RAID0 setup. Got me a score like this:

http://www.allsinclair.com/gfx/w7score.png

[Helmore]

Here is a nice read on about WEI, written by someone whom was part of its development:
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/01/19/engineering-the-windows-7-windows-experience-index.aspx
I'll just give you a nice quote about the harddrive score:
With respect to disk scores, as discussed in our recent post on Windows Performance, we’ve been developing a comprehensive performance feedback loop for quite some time. With that loop, we’ve been able to capture thousands of detailed traces covering periods of time where the computer’s current user indicated an application, or Windows, was experiencing severe responsiveness problems. In analyzing these traces we saw a connection to disk I/O and we often found typical 4KB disk reads to take longer than expected, much, much longer in fact (10x to 30x). Instead of taking 10s of milliseconds to complete, we’d often find sequences where individual disk reads took many hundreds of milliseconds to finish. When sequences of these accumulate, higher level application responsiveness can suffer dramatically.

With the problem recognized, we synthesized many of the I/O sequences and undertook a large study on many, many disk drives, including solid state drives. While we did find a good number of drives to be excellent, we unfortunately also found many to have significant challenges under this type of load, which based on telemetry is rather common. In particular, we found the first generation of solid state drives to be broadly challenged when confronted with these commonly seen client I/O sequences.

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. Internally, we feel confident in the beta disk assessment and these caps based on the data we have observed so far. Of course, we expect to learn from data coming from the broader beta population and from feedback and conversations we have with drive manufacturers.

For those obtaining low disk scores but are otherwise satisfied with the performance, we aren’t recommending any action (Of course the WEI is not a tool to recommend hardware changes of any kind). It is entirely possible that the sequence of I/Os being issued for your common workload and applications isn’t encountering the issues we are noting. As we’ve said, the WEI is a metric but only you can apply that metric to your computing needs.

Earlier, I made note of the fact that our new levels, 6 and 7, were added to recognize the improved experiences one might have with newer hardware, particularly SSDs, graphics adapters, and multi-core processors. With respect to SSDs, the focus of the newer tests is on random I/O rates and their avoidance of the long latency issues noted above. As a note, the tests don’t specifically check to see if the underlying storage device is an SSD or not. We run them no matter the device type and any device capable of sustaining very high random I/O rates will score well
That's pretty much the entire article though :p:
About the bold part, which I did myself, that's exactly what we were seeing with OCZ's first SSDs. Apparently there are some other ordinary HDD that do not operate in the way they should if judged by their latency and throughput, which is also reflected in the resulting score. Although they are also saying that you can take the score with a grain of salt, if you aren't experiencing any performance issues.

@CandymanCan: I have a single WD6400AAKS and my score is 5.9. My lowest score is from my CPU though, no wonder though as it's an AMD 3800 X2 for Socket 939 :p: and it gets me 4.6.

[rge]

My single intel SSD gets 7.0 or 7.1 for disk score. Superspeeders ramdisk would get 7.9 (highest score) easy. The above post and the I/0 bench thread (http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=167857) you can see I/0 on SSD versus raptors in raid or other hard disks, and superspeeders ramdisk. Couple others in that thread with incredible speeds would likely get 7.9's as well.

[LennyRhys]

Processor 7.1
Memory 5.9
Aero 7.9
Graphics 6.4
Hard Disk 2.9

I get a "poor" HDD rating too but my system is fast - who cares lol? :D

[One_Hertz]

Naturally, they do it by random IOPS. Anybody with half a brain knows that is by far the most important when assessing disk performance.

[ewitte]

I think its a compbination because my random iops is still lower than his single intel but we have the same score. However my read/write is about 400/270. It is still really sad if you compare the hdtune access test on the SSD versus the storage drives. lol.

[One_Hertz]

I think its a compbination because my random iops is still lower than his single intel but we have the same score. However my read/write is about 400/270. It is still really sad if you compare the hdtune access test on the SSD versus the storage drives. lol.

I don't think they are comparing IOPS per say. As far as I understood it, I think they are comparing the maximum time it takes for an input/ouput operation, not the average. Two different things...

[ewitte]

It can't hurt ;) Side by side versus 7200rpm storage drive.

[XS Janus]

Why dont we see more people use HD tunes IO meter?
It looks very straight forward, but Im sure it has some important flaw, that some one would care to explain... :)

[GTSRboy]

I unchecked 'enable write caching' on my disk and my HDD score jumped from 3.0 to 5.9

Then i promptly re-checked it.

[One_Hertz]

I unchecked 'enable write caching' on my disk and my HDD score jumped from 3.0 to 5.9

Then i promptly re-checked it.

makes sense as caching makes maximum delays longer.

[ewitte]

Is there a point in having it enabled in windows when its enabled for the controller itself? Hmmm I need to do some testing.

[One_Hertz]

Is there a point in having it enabled in windows when its enabled for the controller itself? Hmmm I need to do some testing.

Good question. I have no idea. I've done some basic testing and the only place caching shows any changes in performance are synthetic benchmarks. I've tried a bunch of real world stuff and didn't see any differences, except when copying files, the first 256MB or so seems to copy very fast (because it is writing to the cache) and then normal afterwards. Games/apps load at exactly the same speeds for me regardless of the status of the cache.

I keep my cache on, but I am not basing that decision on anything but synthetic benchmarks.

[ewitte]

Good question. I have no idea. I've done some basic testing and the only place caching shows any changes in performance are synthetic benchmarks. I've tried a bunch of real world stuff and didn't see any differences, except when copying files, the first 256MB or so seems to copy very fast (because it is writing to the cache) and then normal afterwards. Games/apps load at exactly the same speeds for me regardless of the status of the cache.


It helps a HUGE amount with the small files. Larger files are generally faster to begin with.

[XS Janus]

When I enable mine on my Raid controller it gets enabled in Windows as well.
Likewise when I enable it in device manager, the check box in RAID card's software also gets checked!

I don't know how you guys can say you can't see the difference.
I tested my RAID5 array and this is what I go in real life tests...
http://img220.imageshack.us/img220/4639/raid58drivesln5.jpg