SSD 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 Write performance
The most important and difficult task for any SSD is... writing really small files fast, so let's start off there and have look at that with this WRITE test. We scale 4KB block sizes to large 1024KB block sizes in bursts of 32MB with a queue depth of 4 and then measure how fast the storage device is dealing with them. The storage units we used:
- Maxtor 6 Y200M0 200GB
- WD1500HLFS VelociRaptor
- OCZ Summit 250GB (MLC)
- OCZ Vertex 120Gb (MLC) -- results updated with new 1.30 firmware
- OCZ Agility 120GB (MLC).
We recently added the newest model Western Digital WD1500HLFS VelociRaptor to our test suite, it is the fastest and most expensive 10k RPM HDD your money can get you. It's write performance however is unprecedentedly good. For a real average experience we dropped the Maxtor in there as well, this represents your average cheapo HDD.
Now as you can see, we seem to have a bug with ATTO. The SSD registers drive speeds at 250MB/sec which is completely unrealistic. We think... it's registering the cache memory performance instead of NAND FLASH writes. But ignore this one for now please, we are talking to ATTO about it.
ATTO Read performance
The previous test was write performance, but let's have a peek at read performance. The Indilinx based controllers definitely take a lead in this particular benchmark and look at that, the Agility is pushing performance over 200 MB/sec for this heavy test, well that just doesn't suck. It puts the WD Velociraptor to an absolute shame really.
