OK, I am sure that many of you know the Windows Experience Index that ships with Vista and Windows 7?

A conventional electro-mechanical 7,200rpm HDD will score 5.9. That is also true for Windows 8.

I just got two Seagate Barracudas (made in China......that's new) and loaded Win8 Release Preview onto one of them...............I got a WEI of 7.45!!!

I checked both of them (on different machines) with HD Tune v2.55 and got these readings in Megabytes/sec:

Average 162.5/166.5
Minimum 92.5/96.9
Maximum 201.4/211.1

That's around twice the speed of any other HDD I have, and some are no more than 9 months old. Those values are for the whole 1000GB.....these are not hybrid drives.

Something has happened

So watch out for the bargains as they try to offload old stock!