Windows Experience Index Not Working Properly

[ahemsa]

Hello,

I have recently got Windows 7 working on my ACARD ANS-9010 RAM Hard Drive, which had a mere 7.2GB capacity by using vLite to trim down the install. 7 still wouldn't install in that space, so I installed it, disabled the swap file and hibernate and got the used space down to around 3.6GB, and then cloned the install onto my RAM drive. The whole purpose of that exercise was to see what the Windows Experience Index would think of my hard drive. I was actually stunned to see that it got a 7.7! I knew the drive would perform well, I just didn't think it would perform quite THAT well.

Yesterday I acquired an additional 4GB of RAM for my drive. Since I had removed a few too many things on my vLite install, I thought I would start over. I made me a new vLite disc and proceeded to do a fresh install of Windows 7 on my RAM disc, this time I partitioned it manually to do away with the wasted 100MB "reserved" space as well. Everything seems to be working great.

I noticed, however, that now my Windows Experience Index, scores a 5.9 for the Hard Drive. The test appears to run fine. When it gets to the hard drive section, it does access the drive for a second, according to the activity LED's on the drive. I don't get any errors, but when finished, it's always a 5.9. I have run some third party HD benchmarks and they show the HD as being as fast as it ever was. I have tried manually deleting the WinSAT data and re-running the test, it always comes back with 5.9.

I was curious if anybody could lend some insight into this problem. Does it simply not have enough free space to run the test? I have 2.23GB free. Does it need that 100MB "reserved" partition to run the test?

Ultimately it doesn't matter, the benchmark score doesn't actually make the system any faster, but it would be nice if it would report the actual performance, for bragging rights if nothing else.

Any Ideas?

[ahemsa]

How stupid is this? I decided that just for fun I should try to defragment the disk. This being a purely RAM based hard drive, it should have no bearing on it whatsoever. I defragmented the drive, which took maybe a minute, and then ran the test again and it got a 7.8. The test actually took much longer to run too. The only thing I can guess is that it might not have had enough "consecutive" free space to run, so it skipped the test.

[cluberti]

You can run the test manually from a cmd prompt to see what it says - not much help now that you've gotten past it, but I've seen this a number of times on SSD drives where it'll cap it at 5.9 until a defrag.