[av8ur]

I have recently installed Win7 to my old WinXP system, and I ran the Windows Experience Index tool on my system. All of the rankings were 7.0 to 7.2, except for the Data Transfer Rate which is 5.9. The pertinent equipment in my system is as follows:

ASUS M3A32-MVP mobo
AMD Phenom 9600 quad core CPU
4GB Corsair DDR2-1000 RAM
2 Western Digital Velociraptor 10,000 rpm HDD's

The concern I have is that even though these are not the newest top of the line hardware, I have always been under the understanding that with my hard drives set to RAID 0, and with them having the higher RPM rating, that the data transfer rate would be on the high end of the index. 5.9 on the index seems too low in comparison to the rest of my hardware.

The ultimate question is, could it be possible that a RAID 0 configuration may actually be working slower than if I were utilizing one of the hard drives as a stand alone drive without a RAID 0 configuration? Thoughts/tweaks/etc.... Thanks.

[av8ur]

Ah, perhaps I have found the answer. In re-reading the Index statistics, it appears that the test also ran across my D: drive, an extra hdd in my system I use for storage. It is a standard WD 7,200 rpm drive. That may well explain it.

[Compiler]

RAID 0 is usually not much faster for a desktop system - a waste of money and of course higher chance of failure and data loss.

The index doesn't tell you the ACTUAL performance of the system. Just more of a general crap / good / great...

My $65 (today) ATI 4670 video card ranks at 6.8 (3D & Gaming)... high by Win7 standards... lower-mid-range by gaming standards.

My 7200RPM 500GB drives are a 5.5... but in the real world, they max out at about 100mb/s (avg 65). My Quad and of course any modern AMD X2~X4 CPU would stomp your "7.x" CPU into the ground, but its still a 7 by MS index.

If you want a higher number.... you'll need something like SSDs.

Whatever... its a ranking performance score. It has little value.

[Compiler]

No, about your #2 HD. It says "primary hard drive"

[crjdriver]

If you are using the onboard raid, I would really get rid of it. The SB600 chipset used on that board is pretty poor for raid. I always tell people that if they really really want raid, then buy a real raid card.

As an example, my system scores a 7.5 on primary hard disk. It is a single WD "Black" series drive w/32meg of cache. SATA mode is set to ahci.

[av8ur]

I pretty much figured that the Index is mostly a guideline, it just seemed odd that it showed my other hardware right up there with the best of them, but the data transfer rate being low. And when you pull up the statistics for the index test, it actually shows 'both' the primary and the secondary 'D:' drive. But, thanks for the info.