HDD weighing down WEI

All mechanical HDD's are limited to 5.9 on WEI. the olny way to go above that with a single drive is Solid State Disks.

5.9 is the highest score you can get with a 7200RPM mechanical hard drive. You would need a Solid State Drive to get in the 7.0s. My 64GB Samsung 830 gives me a 7.9. I wouldn't put much stock into the WEI scores though. Not really important in the grand scheme of things. A SSD for your system/boot drive would raise your score and improve boot speeds. Also if you get a large enough one for your most used applications they will load and respond a little faster.

The WEI is the worst way to measure a system's performance. Also, hollet is correct. Even a WD Raptor drive only get a 5.9.

The max you will get for any HDD for WEI is a 5.9. You Might be able to get a 6.0 by using Raid0 with two High end drives.

Now for rationale. in vista wei was limited to 5.9, However with Windows 7 max score was rasied to 7.9. This was to accomadate SSD Hard drives which are 20-> 50 Times faster than a mechanical HDD. (ie a mechanical HDD has approx 12.6 mSec access time. SSDs can be less than 0.1 m Sec. Random 4 K read/writes (Much more important than Seq performance) can be as low as 1 Mb/s for HDDs and are typically > 40 MB/s for SSDs

Bottom Line HHD =< 5.9. SSD => 6.0, and typical Sata III SSDs => 7.7

Please do NOT get caught up in the "WIE is garbage" that is Not the question Here, nor the issue.

Thanks for the input everyone!

Ahhh.. that makes perfect sense. I'm not too concerned with my WEI HDD score.. it was mostly a matter of pride. So I guess it's as good as it gets. My graphics, CPU and RAM ratings were all 6.9 and 7.1 and once an application has loaded up it's all about the graphics, RAM and CPU right? (For the most part, I mean)

A few questions about SSD's now (off-topic on this forum I know).
For my budget I'd probably have to buy a 60-80 GB one and just use it for system boot and commonly used applications. I've already installed Windows 7 on the aforementioned 750 GB HDD on a partition of roughly 640 GB (I have 10 GB for a Windows XP install and 100 GB of a blank partition just because).

Assuming the used space on my HDD is within what would fit on the SSD, if I use Windows Backup & Restore to create an image of that partition can I restore it to a SSD that is of a smaller size than the original partition without issue? Same question, but what if I used Norton Ghost 15?

Also if I make a backup image of just my Windows 7 partition and restore it to a new SSD but keep the Windows XP partition on the HDD (cause let's face it I put it on there for nostalgia so if the HDD fails, big whoop) will that mess up the BCD boot-up stuff? And if it did would it just be the matter of running a simple startup repair with my Windows 7 disc?

When moving from an HDD to a SSD, the majority (me Included) would vote to do a Clean Install with The HDD DISCONNECTED.
.. DON'T forget Bios should be set for ahci, if HDD win 7 installation was done using ide mode - fix it first.
.. Clean Install will.
.... Enable Trim.
.... will setup the partition alignment correctly.
.... Should also DISABLE defrag - you do not want to run defrag on an SSD.

On size. While a 60 gig SSD will work, My Min recommended size is an 80 gig, with the recommended size of 120/128 gig.

With SSDs it is very important that you leave a Min of 10 % free (Some recommend a Min of 15->20 % free, I'm in this camp). This is so wear leveling, Garbage collection, and trim can work their Magic. So bottom line, 60 gig is really only a 50 gig at max SSD, Typical, NOT gaming, Win 7 + program installation somewheres around 30->35 gigs.

Primarily and SSD will:
.. Great boost to boot time, My systems go from Loading Operating system to Opening my first program in 15 SEC. (Note: does Not iinclude post time).
.. Load programs FAST. I click on a spreadsheet and excel + spreadsheet are up in the Blink of an eye.
.. All files that ARE ON the SSD load much faster.

An SSD will NOT.
.. make programs run faster.
.. NO increase in FPS for games, (Will only improve time to load maps or other files while plaing the game.
.. Will NOT improve downloading a file - That is pretty much dictated by your ISP speed.

ADDED:
And Yes there are programs that will transfer OS plus selected programs from a HDD -> SSD. This is often included in Laptop Kit SSD. Desktop kits normally include a 2.5" to 3.5 In bracket. OEM drives give you jack.
Most common are EaseUS, EZ GIG II, and ghost. I have used the first two.

Think you meant easeus instead of easy   All the tools retiredchief mentioned will do what you want (migrate from a larger drive to a smaller one though most charge you for that feature).

You can find 128gb SSDs on a regular basis below $100 on both newegg, tigerdirect and microcenter.

^ correct on both counts.

Usually 120/128Gb SSDs are faster than the 60Gb version. The best are the 256Gb but the 120/128Gb are fast enough and you should have enough space to install Windows and a few programs like office ...

You can use softwares like acronis, ghost, macrium and others to clone the HDD to a SSD. Or you can use the software supplied by the SSD manufacture, you can download the software from the manufacturer website, even Intel have software avalaible for cloning.

Hope this help!