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 32 MB sequence of 4 KB files, yet also 32 MB in 1 MB files. This gives us an excellent scope of overall performance with small and large files.

But let's have a peek at actual read performance. I threw in a couple of comparable SSDs and a Western Digital Velociraptor HDD. A bit of a dip up-to 8 K block files. 

The most important and difficult task for any storage unit is writing really small files fast, so have a look at that with this WRITE test. We scale 4 KB block sizes to 1,024 KB block sizes in bursts of 256 MB with a queue depth of 10 and then measure how fast the storage device is dealing with them. 

Follow the red line, hard to imagine that a USB 3.1 flash storage unit can keep up this well. Very decent but we do find the Extreme 500 to be struggling more with small block-sizes and small files. Real world random IOPS writes overall as such will not be great.