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)
• Gskill 128GB Falcon (MLC)
• Patriot Torqx 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. It's write performance however is unprecedentedly good. For a real nice slow experience we dropped the Maxtor in there as well, this represents your average cheapo HDD, I've colored the mechanical HDD drives in light orange and red.

Then in navy blue the OCZ Summit SSD (Samsung controller) and colored in green the G.Skill Falcon SSD, which has the very same innards as the Patriot Torqx. Therefore these two are competing with each other head to head. Mind you that (if interested) the OCZ Vertex is peerforming exactly the same model as the Torqx as well.

In navy blue 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. Orange is the color for the Patriot Torqx.

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 though. Still at 200 MB/sec consistent read performance, well that just doesn't suck. It puts the Velociraptor to an absolute shame really.

As you can see the Falcon and the Torqx are going head to head with each other, with the minor random occurrence here and there of course.