I was especially curious what the performance would be with and without the utility “Intel Rapid Storage Technology” running. I assumed its effect would be positive, but I just couldn’t figure out why my old laptop and my brother’s desktop PC, both with the same drives, score 0.3 points higher in the Windows Experience Index, namely 5.9 vs. my 5.6.
So first I ran a test before restarting, having turned off background antivirus scanning, while all other programs were running as usual. Here is the result:
OK, I disabled everything that launched at startup and restarted. After the restart I measured the WEI (the HDD score went up by 0.1 to 5.7). Then I ran tests with 2 programs:
I enabled at startup “Intel Rapid Storage Technology”, left everything else as it was, such as the disabled AV, and after restarting I measured the WEI again, once more 5.7, and then I got these results:
So what’s the conclusion? With ISRT, linear reads are faster, whereas without it, random reads are faster than with ISRT turned on. Random reads happen when the data is fragmented. I’d say, though, that random reads are more important and more frequent, so I’m going to turn the utility off. I’d really like to know why HDD performance is lower on this laptop.