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 1024KB block sizes in bursts of 256MB 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
• Corsair P128GB (MLC)
• OCZ Vertex Turbo 128GB (MLC)
• G.Skill Falcon II 128GB (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 (Colored in Blue), It's read/write performance is unprecedentedly good. For a real average experience we dropped the Maxtor in there as well, this represents your average cheapo HDD, colored in yellow.

Then in green the OCZ Vertex Turbo SSD colored in Navy Blue the Corsair P128 SSD and finally in red the fast MLC based Vertex 2 rockign it at 230 MB/sec write performance.

** Mind you that we updated our ATTO test suite and as such the benchmarks have all been redone, and they can differ a little here and there compared to old test results from aging articles.

ATTO Read performance

The previous test was write performance, but let's have a peek at read performance. All Indilinx controller based SSDs haul ass and definitely take a lead in this particular benchmark though, strangely enough that's faster than the Vertex 2 at roughly 230 MB/sec.