How is the drive checked to see if it's mechanical or not? Back on Windows 7, I had a 2.5" WD Black 7200RPM drive (no idea on the exact drive model; it was in a Compaq 515 notebook) that would get like 7.2 or 7.3 consistently on WEI. Perhaps WEI wasn't actually detecting my drive as mechanical, and actually telling me a true score? Does WEI add "fake" scores to SSD's (5.9 + numbers), or are SSD's benchmarked as-is, and given an honest score between 0 and 7.9 (or 9.9)? And is there a way to fake a drive as SSD, or at least disable the 5.9 limit for mechanical?
We were testing an OCZ Vertex 4 256GB for rendering purpose and found that after the used space of the SSD was above 100GB (app. 40%) the speed was dropping down to below 8oMB/s for writing. The same on on as SCSI 146GB 15k drive on Adaptect 320, filled with 127GB the speed still was constant above 240MB/s. That said, I would go for the 15k drive, it's more cheap and more fast in the end while you could even use more data. But the whole is entirely up to you and your need, abd for sure: How Much Money you like to spend and than ask yourself: It's worth or not?!
Yes...I ordered a new Seagate ST3600057SS 600GB ($379.99) and a Refurb Cheetah ST3146855SS 147GB ($74.99) from Newegg.ca Three to Five day shipping. I just could not see spending the money on a SSD drive when they are small and once they reach 50% they slow down. May as well stay with SATA drives. Now all I have to do is transfer Windows 8 WMC to the new drive when it gets here. What I don't understand is why SSD drives slow down so much when they reach 50%
You could do a HDD cloning to transfer windows. I use HD Clone Pro which could used for cloning between different hard disk technologies like from SATA to SCSI, SAS or whatsoever. Regarding the reading/writing of SSD's, SSD technology suffers from a performance degradation phenomenom called write amplification, where the NAND cells show a measurable drop in performance, and will continue degrading throughout the life of the SSD. And will decrease with lifetime of that SSD!
on sata to sata hdd's windows truly sucks. i just bought a usb 3.0 drive and controller card and transferring data between it and any of the sata drives is twice as fast as from sata to sata.
The WEI is severely out of tune. They should truly average you score, not base it on your lowest. I have a Seagate Solid State Hybrid Drive running at 5,400 rpms with 64MB of cache and 8gb of flash memory and it still receives a 5.9 for hard drive. Microsoft really needs to upgrade their scoring system....