I INSTALLED A FASTER HARD DRIVE BUT PERFORMANCE DID NOT CHANGE IN WINDOWS7

[Otis]

I just rereplaced my Segate ST31000340AS with a new Segate ST32000641AS (64m / 600mb) double the old drive. Did a clean install the 5.9 number did not change. Anyone knows why?

Gary

 

[The_Prophecy]

Ignore the Windows Experience index. Use the system as you normally would and see if it is any faster. Simply looking at a number in a window on your desktop is not a good way to determine performance.

 

[isamuelson]

Is the 5.9 for your drive or your overall system rating? If it's for your drive, did you get the latest drivers for it? It might still be running under older, compatible drivers that aren't allowing it to perform at it's top speed.

If the drive is rated higher but your overall system experience is 5.9, remember. The Windows Experience overall rating takes on the LOWEST experience rating reported. For example, if your drive is rated at 6.5 but you have memory that has the lowest rating at 4.1 over all your other hardware, then you're overall rating is 4.1, even though you might have a lot of other hardware that's rated higher than that.

 

[Otis]

Thanks for the quick reply, being a retired old fart thought I could more bang for my buck but the hole thing ended up a nightmare. I use Northon Ghost 15 to image the new drive but Windows said it was a bad copy, crap.... Did not plan on a clean install but spent the weekend on it and all is well. My scores are as follows 7.3,7.3,7.4,7.4, and then the 5.9 for the drive. And yes installed all the new drivers from Asus.. Thanks again
Gary

 

[isamuelson]

I wouldn't worry too much about it. You could also be hampered by the motherboard you have. Maybe it can't handle the higher speeds? I wouldn't know without knowing what motherboard you have. I'm assuming your hard drives are all SATA?

 

[Otis]

It is a year old Asus P5Q Deluxe and a Intell Q9650 and yes all SATA.

 

[isamuelson]

Your motherboard can only handle SATA 3Gb/s which is SATA II. Your drive is a SATA-III drive which means it can do max 6Gb/s. Therefore, even though the drive itself can perform up to 6Gb/s, your SATA controller on your motherboard can only handle max 3Gb/s, so that is why you do not see the index increase.

You'll either need to upgrade your motherboard and get one that does handle SATA-III or else, purchase a SATA-III controller to put into a slot on your motherboard.

 

[LePhuronn]

As a last thing then (although it's a bit late since you've completed your reinstall) you can change the SATA mode in your BIOS to AHCI instead of IDE - SATA controller working as intended to do, not doing legacy IDE emulation which is slower.

You can't switch without reformatting your drive though.

 

[Otis]

Gee I looked at that but did not what it was, wish you lived next door! Well next time I screw up will make that change and I thank you all for the input, even at my age never too late to learn a new trick and with that I am going to roll over..

Gary

 

[Otis]

Best answer selected by Otis.

 

[sminlal]

Your motherboard can only handle SATA 3Gb/s which is SATA II. Your drive is a SATA-III drive which means it can do max 6Gb/s. Therefore, even though the drive itself can perform up to 6Gb/s, your SATA controller on your motherboard can only handle max 3Gb/s, so that is why you do not see the index increase.

Sorry, but this is completely wrong!

Hard drives typically have a maximum transfer rate of around 100-150MByte/sec or so. SATA-II can handle up to 300MByte/sec, so it is completely adequate for a hard drive. Going to an all SATA-III connection will not change the performance of the drive. As an analogy, a bicycle can't go any faster on a freeway than a city street - the speed is determined by the cyclist, not by the speed limit.

The reason that the WEI score doesn't change is because the score is scaled such that the fastest hard drives peak out at 5.9. You can get a little above that using RAID, but not much.

The upper end of the WEI scale (which maxes out at 7.9) is pretty much reserved for SSDs (Solid State Disks) which have access times up to 100X faster than any mechanical hard drive.

 

[aberchonbie]

even if it's a sata II/III hd, did you make sure that there was no small connector connecting two pins together on the hard drive? if it is in fact a sata III hd, I doubt it will have it but I noticed that when I built my comp 2 yrs ago, my hard drives had this connector on them (located next to where you plug in the sata cable and sata power)

 

[drksilenc]

jumpers shouldnt matter on a sata drive because of the fact that they arnt using a master slave cable like pata does. when you connect a drive you are going to set the main drive in sata port one and this is the same thing as using the pin configs on the older drives.

 

[The_Prophecy]

jumpers shouldnt matter on a sata drive because of the fact that they arnt using a master slave cable like pata does. when you connect a drive you are going to set the main drive in sata port one and this is the same thing as using the pin configs on the older drives.

Jumpers on a SATA drive are not for adjusting master/slave settings. They are for manually adjusting the interface speed the drive uses (though in some cases the jumper settings are used for enabling certain power management features).