Performance Atto Disk Benchmark

Atto Disk Benchmark

One of the finest tools available to measure storage performance is ATTO. I love it to death as it is so reliable and produces such accurate results. The great thing about ATTO is that we can test with predefined block sizes. So we can test with a 32MB sequence of 4KB files, yet also 32MB in 1MB files. This gives us an excellent scope of overall performance with small and large files.

ATTO Read performance

But let's have a peek at synthetically measured read performance. As you can see after 16/32KB block sizes performance jumps up significantly. That is really impressive read performance there peaking at roughly 190 MB/sec.

ATTO Write performance

The most important and difficult task for any FLASH based storage unit is writing really small files fast, our real-world perf test showed that already. But here we can exactly pinpoint the issue. Have a look at this WRITE test. We scale 4KB block sizes to 1024KB block sizes in bursts of 256MB with a queue depth of 10 and then measure how fast the storage device is dealing with them.

Here's where the USB 3.0 drives all shows their weak spot really well, writing really small files (below 32/64KB) is a horrendous task for the flash unit. Big files however write fast, real fast. This precisely is why we have SandForce and Indilinx cache solution on SSDs.