Decrease in SSD speed per WEI (Relatively small)

[idata]

I have the following 80GB Intel SSD - SSDSA2M080G2GC. It is approximately 2 months old. Several weeks ago when I reran the Windows Experience Index test, the primary drive score dropped from a 7.6 to a 7.3. I have made no significant changes to my computer since installing the drive with the exception of installing a new graphics card. The SSD toolbox reports no issues. TRIM is turned on.

I know WEI is largely an irrelevant measure (everyone says that), but I also know that everyone also wants it to be higher rather than lower .

Can anybody think of a possible cause(s) for the drop in speed or anything I can do to remedy it? I still have over 33 GB space on the drive. Driver version is 6.1.7600.16385.

I would appreciate any suggestions or thoughts you might be able to provide.

Thanks so much,

Ross

[idata]

Some clarification: 'As hardware speed and performance improve, higher score ranges will be enabled. The standards for each level of the index generally stay the same. However, in some cases, new tests might be developed that can result in lower scores.' Pulling a 1 year old forum post in response to this is barely sensible. An 80GB Intel SSD is not up to a 7.8 or 7.9 score under WEI. Over time the scores wil inevitably be reduced. If people want a high score, and in my experience they always want a 7.9 under WEI, they would have to update their hardware regularly. Anyone expecting their hardware to always achieve the same results under WEI is badly mistaken. An 80GB Intel SSD is undeserving of a 7.4 or above score. 7.3 sounds about right. Hopefully Intel will upgrade their SSD's soon as they are in need of a refresh.

[mmokk]

the blog entry is just describing what ms developers had in mind with wei.

my own advice about the wei is to simply ignore it. if you believe your ssd is slowing down, there are other much better benchmarks you can use.

[idata]

The WEI is actually quite a good benchmark with Win 7.

Use CMD and type "winsat disk" and a WEI benchmark will execute. You will see results for each subtest that makes up the overall WEI score.

Here is a X25-M 160 in a used state.

> Disk Sequential 64.0 Read 262.89 MB/s 7.6

> Disk Random 16.0 Read 233.82 MB/s 7.9

> Responsiveness: Average IO Rate 1.16 ms/IO 7.8

> Responsiveness: Grouped IOs 10.83 units 7.0

> Responsiveness: Long IOs 2.78 units 7.9

> Responsiveness: Overall 30.14 units 7.5

> Responsiveness: PenaltyFactor 0.0

> Disk Sequential 64.0 Write 104.95 MB/s 6.6

> Average Read Time with Sequential Writes 0.488 ms 7.9

> Latency: 95th Percentile 1.767 ms 7.8

> Latency: Maximum 281.883 ms 7.1

> Average Read Time with Random Writes 0.551 ms 7.9

> Total Run Time 00:01:07.27

A drop of 0.1 in the overall score between fresh and used state is to be expected. Results can be affected by background tasks and cache.