Windows 7 Hard Drive Performance

So it looks like write caching is affecting some of you adversely (scorewise) ...so we're all getting to about 6.0 on the hdd score then.
 
i was actually gonna make a post on this but glad someone already has. I went from a seagate 300g, sata2 300 w/ 8meg cache (scoring a 3.0) and just bought two seagate 500g sata2 300 w/16m cache and my score stayed the same (3.0). I was about ready to return them and get my money back but it seems the cache is causing performance testing problems. I'll keep testing.

As for seagate drives, I like em well enough. decent speed - maybe not the fastest, but no the slowest either
 
depends on the drive...i have 2 seagate 250gb sata hdds, 1 WD 250gb sata hdd, 1 Seagate 500GB hdd, and 1 WD 500GB hdd - all 7200rpm 16mb cache drives I think, but copy speeds really vary among them. The 500gb disks are the fastest ...avging 90+mb/s copies, while the 250s are a bit slower. In fact the seagate 250gb that I have Vista installed on avgs about 59mb/s copying..so it's kind of random.
 
HEADS UP!!!

The storage drivers that come with W7 are not very good.

If you install the latest Vista drivers from Intel you will get the higher hd rating with the write-cache enabled.

I just tried it with the 64-bit drivers.
 
For what it is worth. I just tried some experiments with copying/moving with very large files. The caching does improve the performance slightly. So I think the problem is with the WEI, not with the caching. It is submitting bogus figures.
 
I don't think anyone is disagreeing with you. But the mystery to most(to me anyway) is why the WEI can change by removing the cache and then reinstating it - with the same drivers.
fwiw. I do have the latest drivers installed.
 
My Western Digital 2500KS SATA 3.0, gets a 5.5 rating, similar to that with Vista, on my AMD/nVidia system.

To be honest, I am skeptical of the value of WEI. I think Microsoft should eliminate the feature, as it is only a source of anxiety for all, including myself.
It does not serve any useful purpose. It only serves to make us question our perfectly fine hardware, and view our machines as somehow inferior.
It would seem to require a room-filling Supercomputer, with the high-piched whine of fast hard drives and cooling fans causing our ears to bleed, to get an overall rating of 7.9 or whatever the maximum is.
Let's just forget about it!

Windows Experience Index = :mad:
 
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1 - I installed the Intel Vista x64 chipset drivers + the Intel Matrix Software that seems to install AHCI drivers.

2 - Based on the usual copying of files and whatnot, I think hdd speeds are on par with Vista for the most part. It's not like we're seeing 30mb/s transfers between hard disks right?

3 - I think maybe the Win 7 WEI for hard disks is maybe taking into account new technologies maybe? Like SSDs? I haven't look through all the replies here to see if anyone posted hdd score for an SSD..but that could explain part of it.

4 - Yah maybe the drivers aren't optimized...but I don't see any noticeable hdd performance drop off in Win 7.

I think the only reason this is bothering everyone - and that includes the lower GPU scores - is that you see a big fat 6.0 on your base score. I haven't seen many if any complaints about massive FPS drops in games or hdd issues (aside from those detection issues) ..so we just need to get over it.
 
Yeah thats a weird kind of test..got the same trouble with my hard drive, and the said above way to fix it poped my hdd's performane from 3 to 4.6
 
Hi Parzvt.
" I haven't seen many if any complaints about massive FPS drops in games or hdd issues (aside from those detection issues) ..so we just need to get over it. "

Yes. I was going to start a thread on this. I do not play Internet games. One of the most frequent complaints with Vista (The web is full of them) was it's poor game playing ability. I cannot comment. As I say, I have no experience in that area. Whether it was the grahics software people to blaim, or the heavy demands from the OS, is speculative.
But, to get to my point, it is very obvious that these complaints are not coming up so often, concenring Windows 7. This must, surely, be a good sign.
 
I think the general population didn't realize Vista had relatively high system requirements compared to Win XP - that's one reason there were so many complaints. And probably then a combination of immature drivers, Vista overhead combined with people running machines with minimal ram (minimal for vista anyway) just made gaming rough on Vista. I do remember getting 20fps slower performance in Battlefield 2142 in Vista than in XP. But now hardware has mostly caught up, RAM is abundant and cheap, and Win 7 seems to cache a little less than Vista did. In Vista x64 now, I always see 6.4GB or so cached with the remainder free, while Win 7 seems to cache only 3 or 4GB (I have 8GB). Crysis Warhead and Far Cry 2 seem to run as fast as they do on Vista the few minutes I tried them. I had to put the games back on the Vista side though b/c of the whole punkbuster issue.

Honestly Win 7 seems more like Vista SP3 - subtract/fix all the crap that pissed everyone off, get rid of the overhead, and add the new features that were worked since Vista's release. But I guess a name change helps w/ the stigma of the Vista name :)
 
Got this from the Microsoft TecNet forums... you need to disable caching...you do this by going to control panel>device manager>your hard drive>policies>uncheck "write caching"click okay, ...redo the performance test.....after doing this, my hard drive performance went from 3.0 to 5.9.

Nevermind, I see this was already posted......
 
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Bios and SATA settings might be the problem?

I have the same problem with my Seagate 250gb SATA 3 drive posting only a 3 on the WEI. Looking into my Motherboards BIOS settings, I see that my drive is set for “Native IDEâ€Â￾ mode, and I think that may have something to do with how windows is seeing these drives. This was how it was set during my installation of win7. I should have changed it from Native to the AHCI mode, and then I would probaly be scoring higher. Next time, I will change these settings to see if that is the problem.

(from my mobo manual)

[FONT=ArialNarrow,Bold, sans-serif]OnChip SATA Type[/FONT]
[FONT=ArialNarrow, sans-serif]Configures the operating mode of the integrated SATA controller. [/FONT][FONT=ArialNarrow, sans-serif]Native IDE Allows the SATA controller to operate in Native IDE mode. (Default) [/FONT][FONT=ArialNarrow, sans-serif]Enable Native IDE mode if you wish to install operating systems that support [/FONT][FONT=ArialNarrow, sans-serif]Native mode, e.g. Windows XP/2000.[/FONT]


[FONT=ArialNarrow, sans-serif]SATA ->AHCI Configures the SATA controller to AHCI mode. Advanced Host Controller [/FONT][FONT=ArialNarrow, sans-serif]Interface (AHCI) is an interface specification that allows the storage driver to [/FONT][FONT=ArialNarrow, sans-serif]enable advanced Serial ATA features such as Native Command Queuing and [/FONT][FONT=ArialNarrow, sans-serif]hot plug.[/FONT]
 
I have the same problem with my Seagate 250gb SATA 3 drive posting only a 3 on the WEI. Looking into my Motherboards BIOS settings, I see that my drive is set for “Native IDEâ€Â￾ mode, and I think that may have something to do with how windows is seeing these drives. This was how it was set during my installation of win7. I should have changed it from Native to the AHCI mode, and then I would probaly be scoring higher. Next time, I will change these settings to see if that is the problem.

(from my mobo manual)

[FONT=ArialNarrow,Bold, sans-serif]OnChip SATA Type[/FONT]
[FONT=ArialNarrow, sans-serif]Configures the operating mode of the integrated SATA controller. [/FONT][FONT=ArialNarrow, sans-serif]Native IDE Allows the SATA controller to operate in Native IDE mode. (Default) [/FONT][FONT=ArialNarrow, sans-serif]Enable Native IDE mode if you wish to install operating systems that support [/FONT][FONT=ArialNarrow, sans-serif]Native mode, e.g. Windows XP/2000.[/FONT]


[FONT=ArialNarrow, sans-serif]SATA ->AHCI Configures the SATA controller to AHCI mode. Advanced Host Controller [/FONT][FONT=ArialNarrow, sans-serif]Interface (AHCI) is an interface specification that allows the storage driver to [/FONT][FONT=ArialNarrow, sans-serif]enable advanced Serial ATA features such as Native Command Queuing and [/FONT][FONT=ArialNarrow, sans-serif]hot plug.[/FONT]

Well mine are AHCI.....it's will not do any different..... it's the "Enable write caching on the device"

My seagates drive are now 5.9
 
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