Improving disk data transfer rates of a SSD (Win 7)

Factual Questions
1

Poking about my PC I see my Windows Experience Index is 6.9. Every other rating is 7.4 except data transfer rate. It’s a Crucial 128 GB drive. Is 6.9 the best rating I can expect? I know I shouldn’t defrag an SSD, but that’s about it—is there any maintenance or other tweaks to speed it up?

Note, I have no complaints about the drive per se, I’m just wondering if there are things I should/could be doing.

2
  • Disable Indexing
  • Disable Defragmentation (Windows 7 might do this automatically if it detects an SSD…not sure but heard that somewhere)
  • Disable write caching
  • Configure Superfetch to cache boot files only
  • Consider disabling the Page file (note if your program needs more memory than you have available in RAM the program will crash so this depends on how much RAM you have and how you use your PC)
3

I think the Windows Experience Index is actually locked to specific numbers for hard-drives, since it’s a bit tricky to evaluate their relative performance accurately. I’ve never seen a mechanical drive get anything other than 5.9, regardless of whether it’s spinning at 5,400 RPM or 10,000.

4

Probably not anything that will change the WEI score - it is a set of synthetic benchmarks and doesn’t rely on your Windows configuration options.

Things you could try:

  1. Make sure your controller is operating in AHCI mode (the other option will usually be called something like “Legacy” or “ATA”). Note that changing this will “scare” Windows. If you do it on XP (which you don’t have, since you have the WEI), the system will bluescreen 7B on boot. Under 7, you’ll probably need to run “Startup repair” from your install disc. Normally I wouldn’t suggest doing this at any other time than when first installing a PC.

  2. If your drive is attached to an Intel chipset and you’re using the MSAHCI driver, you could try installing the Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver (IASTOR). Likewise, I don’t suggest this except for new installs.

BTW, in general larger-capacity SSDs are faster, since they operate multiple sets of flash in parallel. The smaller versions of the same model just omit some of the sets of flash rather than using differently-sized flash chips, since that way they can use the same circuit board layout.

I get a WEI of 7.7 on a Crucial M300 256GB on a Dell Studio 1558 notebook. :smiley: