I recently rebuilt my PC and installed Windows 7 Bit on an i3 system with 8GB of ram. The motherboard runs sata2 and I have 4 WD hard disks installed. Windows experience quotes 5.9 for the hard disks and this is based on a 1tb Caviar Green drive which is around 3 years old. I recently purchased a 1 tb Caviar Black drive and copied the image over to the new drive.
Windows experience still quotes 5.9. I have done some simulated performance runs and this new black drive runs at 107MB/sec whereas the old green drive sticks at around 86MB/sec. I assumed that this was probably down to the restrictions of sata2, thus bought a scsi card which provides sata3 support. Having installed the drivers and rerunning the simulated performance runs, I see no speed improvement and windows experience still quotes 5.9. The other 2 older drives are 3200 SE16 drives and have identical speeds of 54.5MB/sec.
What I am trying to establish is whether this is about right for my system? I expected the windows experience figure to rise from 5.9 to probably 6.2 or higher given the 20% speed increase of the black drive over the green one. I had some problems with the sata 3 scsi card installation and am still not 100% sure it is working correctly, even though no problems are reported by windows. Windows BSOD on shutting down when the card is installed in the PCIex4 slot, but does not if installed in the PCIex16 slot where the graphics card normally sits.
I do a lot of image editing and load and save files all the time, thus was wanting to ensure I had improved the disk performance as well as I could without going to the expense of getting solid state drives.
Any clues or pointers would be welcomed. I understand that I might not actually have a problem, it might be just my lack of appreciation for the complexities of all the factors involved.
Hi PaulBro with the windows experience score no mechanical hard drive not even a raptor gets over 5.9. Above 5.9 is for ssd drives that can transfer at 400. I run 2 sata 3 600 raptors they get 5.9 i ignore it.
So what sort of read/write rates do you get off your two drives? I appreciate that these are simulated as there are so many variables, but even a rough figure will give me more of an idea as I’m not convinced my sata3 is working correctly or whether I actually need this scsi card installed in my system to gain the maximum performance from my drives.
Hi yes I have not bench tested these drives yet as they are new im not much of a bench tester myself I feel to much of it and on a brand new drive is not good for the drive. As for ssd drives yes very nice when they work I may get one. When i dont see all the problems on every manufactures forum but for now I like a drive to last 4 or 5 years so I use enterprise drives.
I am also seeing extremely low performance out of this drive. I installed my new WD Live Drive connected directly to my Cisco 4200 gigabit port. When trying to upload 109 gigs of music via my wireless Laptop it took two full days. The throughput was much better when connected wired. At this point, I can download files faster from the internet then I can upload to local WD drive in the house.
Is there a patch on the way to resolve or should this just be returned?
