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.
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 Vertex 120GB (MLC)
- Gskill 128GB Falcon (MLC)
- OCZ Summit 250GB (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 unprecedented good. For a real nice slow experience we dropped the Maxtor in there as well, this is your average cheapo HDD, I've colored the mechanical HDD drives in blue.
Then in light green the OCZ Vertex SSD and colored in orange the lovely G.Skill Falcon SSD. These two are competing with each other head to head.
In red we added the Summit, and though it's a bit of a rough start with this benchmark, don't let the number fool you just yet. As you can see, the performance is really good. The 128MB cache memory kicks in really hard in the smaller file block sizes.
ATTO Read performance
Once we noticed the read performance of the tested unit again we see things are equalizing a little better. The Indilinx based controllers definitely take a lead in this particular benchmark though. Still at 200 MB/sec consistent read performance, well that just doesn't suck. It puts the Velociraptor to an absolute shame really.
Mind you that the OCZ Vertex and G.Skill Falcon 'should' perform the same. The G.Skill Falcon had a newer firmware, which seems to help a little here and there.
