Intel X25-M ‘G2’ 34nm 160GB SSD Review

IOMeter v2006.07.27 – IOps

Iometer is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. It was originally developed by the Intel Corporation and announced at the Intel Developers Forum (IDF) on February 17, 1998 – since then it got wide spread within the industry.

Meanwhile Intel has discontinued to work on Iometer and it was given to the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL). In November 2001, a project was registered at SourceForge.net and an initial drop was provided. Since the relaunch in February 2003, the project is driven by an international group of individuals who are continuesly improving, porting and extend the product.

The second generation X25-M builds on the already stellar load-scaling performance of it’s older brother.  Raw IOPS output is best seen in our Web Server benchmark with peaks as high as 10% above the first gen unit.  It also seems to be handling mixed reads and writes with greater consistency, as seen in our File Server benchmark, which uses an 80/20 read/write ratio.

(From my last review): Queue depth is used when commands are sent to the drive from multiple threads and/or applications in parallel.  The commands effectively ‘stack up’ on the drive.  The X25-M takes *significant* advantage of this, performing anywhere from 2-5x better than the others depending on demand.  Most of the competition stays at a constant performance level, so adding parallel demands on the SSD will result in a drop in speed as seen by each parallel application.  This is because those demands must be spread across a constant rate of task completion.  While the other drives maintain their status quo, the X25 just picks up steam.