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.

Above READ performance managed with ATTO. The SandForce-1200 series controller based SSDs kicks ass, however the all new SATA 300 / 6G SandForce 2200 series SSDs like the Vertex 3 are ... astonishing.

All SSDs are all really fast, but for today's tested drive that's 285 MB/sec read performance when it's peaking. And again look at the tremendous increase in small file operation performance.

Compare a little with the traditional HDD, we included the WD Velociraptor in light blue.

The most important and difficult task for any storage unit 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 10 and then measure how fast the storage device is dealing with them.

Again the new Vertex 3 is leaving everything behind, but the Zalman N series is managing really well at roughly 275 MB/sec.