Awesomes.net so Awesome, its Awesome(S)

Disk WEI of 5.9 on a new SSD

I'm on my 3rd SSD after these two died:

• Died in:< 7 days OCZ Technology 120 GB Vertex 2 Series SATA II 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive (SSD) OCZSSD2-2VTXE120G
• Died in:< 1month Patriot Inferno 120 GB SATA II 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive (SSD) with TRIM Support PI120GS25SSDR  
• 3rd replacement:
  Crucial Technology 128 GB Crucial RealSSD C300 Series Solid State Drive CTFDDAC128MAG-1G1
  To note the two that died are both running the: SandForce SF-1222 and MLC NAND memory

So this time, I'm went with a brand that's tried and true and I trust. The Crucial C300, has a Marvell controller and Micron NAND memory.

The only problem I was having is when I ran WEI tests (Windows Experience Index) I got a 5.9 for the Disk performance. How could this be?  I thought It was supposed to be an awesome drive?! Well, digging in deeper its worth noting that if one of the Disk tests fail during the benchmarking, the report defaults to a 5.9 for the WEI index for the Disk category.

To dig deeper I started running the command line equivalent to see if I can get more details: Winsat.exe

When running winsat disk I get the error:

> Running: Storage Assessment '-scen 2009 -drive C:'
Error: Failed to properly assess the disk.
The operation completed successfully.

When running the command directly:

I get the error:

C:\WINDOWS\system32>winsat disk -scen 2009
Windows System Assessment Tool
> Running: Feature Enumeration ''
> Run Time 00:00:00.00
> Running: Storage Assessment '-scen 2009 -drive C:'
Error: Failed to properly assess the disk.
The operation completed successfully.
> Run Time 00:00:00.08
> Total Run Time 00:00:04.34

Looking at the log: C:\Windows\Performance\WinSAT\winsat.log
I see:

3461474 (10280) - storage\diskprof.cpp:2324: Unable to open temporary file. Largest available contiguous space was: 802MB
3461474 (10280) - storage\diskprof.cpp:0283: Error: Failed to properly assess the disk.
The operation completed successfully.
3461506 (10280) - winsat\processresults.cpp:1480: > Wrote disk score to the registry 0

Going into this I wouldn't think that I would ever need to use Defrag anymore but for WinSat.exe and WEI to properly analyze the disk it needs to find a contiguous space large enough to perform this type of test. After running defrag the issue was fixed.

The WEI Disk score now: 7.7 

To note:

• I could find very little documentation that goes beyond the "winsat /?" command to find more info on the triggers and what, specifically the trigger "-scen 2009" does. I've altered the "2009" only to get a failure: "Unable to open file: 0009" My guess is this is some type of argument that gets passed to diskprof.cpp
• I also saw some references to the prefetch folder when digging deeper into this with procmon. I'll need to dig deeper but I thought that Windows 7 automatically disables these on detection of an SSD as this is a fresh Win7 install.