Engineering the Windows 7 “Windows Experience Index”

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MielieSpoor

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Very good article explaining quite a bit on the Windows Experience index and has got a lekka big section on HDD's.

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
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I though it was a very good read! Linky
 
Nice find, MielieSpoor.
Interesting, too, is the discussion afterwards, and the further clarifications.

Of particular note is the new info on the disk benchmarking, especially solid state disks. It seems almost all the early SSDs had real-world performance problems that typical tests couldn't pickup. Read the article for more.

Many disks will see a lower WEI score in Win7 than in Vista because they've tightened the tests to reflect real-world use (where command-chaining in the disk can lead to annoying hangs and freezes in everyday use but hard to detect in benchmarks - see the article & subsequent comments for more):

On the matter of keeping the tests consistent between operating system releases, we debated this internally and decided it was best to accept some changes to address positive, and sometimes negative, issues that impact realistic scenarios. In support of this decision, I'd like to point out we had a great deal of data in our hands highlighting some common performance issues with disks, including almost all of the early solid state disks as they hit the market. Given the WinEI tests were not sophisticated enough to catch the problem, it seemed wrong for us to continue to highlight the drives as being good, or very good, when in fact they were the root of many responsiveness issues.
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If you read the article, you'll see that the way scores are calculated has changed to be a more accurate reflection of the performance of the hardware. Vista calculations didnt take into account pathological behaviours that MS discovered after the testing algorithms were developed.

So basically, your HDD was always a 3.0, Vista just wasnt aware of it.
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