Hard drives 101 - Greenhorn needs advice

[bkdamon]

Hi!

I'm disappointed to see WEI didn't see an improvement with my new faster(?) HD, still at 5.9 so I'm digging deeper trying to find out if I need to change a setting or is this what I should be seeing.

Below are the results from my WD Black 1 tb sata 3 6gb/s 7200 HD I just installed to replace a 5400 sata 2.
I have it connected to Sata3_0 on the mb (z68 extreme4) and it is the only drive.

I set the bios to AHCI after installing W7 64 bit, I realize know it should have been done beforehand but all works just don't know if it's as fast as it can be because of that.

If it matters, I primarily use this computer for flight sims/games

My questions are: Do I need to re-install W7? Are these the optimal settings?

Thanks for any help!

[bahram_alinezhad]

Simply attach your old drive (or another comparable one) and use the same program to test and compare it. Depending on which method your test program uses and from which part of drive it reads, It is hard to judge now. Your hard is fairly fast but maybe not as much as expected from a Black WD. Please compare yourself or press the "Compare Results" button!

[PrairieDawg]

So far as I know Windows Experience Index maxes out at 5.9 with mechanical hard drives so I wouldn't be using it as a measuring tape in this instance.

[bkdamon]

Yes, I've learned that as I did more research. Looks like I need to thing SSD if I want a performance boost. Thanks for the replies!!

[PrairieDawg]

You probably DID get a performance boost from your old drive. It's just that WEI does not recognize that particular improvement. A SSD would certainly be a bigger improvement especially with boot times from what I understand.