Kingston SSDNow V Series (2nd Gen) 128GB SSD Review – JMicron JMF618 Makes an Appearance!

IOMeter v2006.07.27 

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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.

Our fears in the prior tests were confirmed with our IOMeter test suite.  The competition climbs all over itself while the JMF612 stays horizontal, joining the OCZ Summit.  A flat line in this test means the drive does not take advantage of Native Command Queueing (NCQ).  NCQ is a means for the OS to pile several requests onto the drive simultaneously.  Drives taking advantage of this can use it to parallelize it’s internal communication with the flash and ultimately ramp up their speed even further.

The JMicron controller may not have scaled well here, but at least it’s cache doesn’t get overloaded like the Samsung (Summit) does, noted by the Orange line falling towards 0 during a few of the test progressions (accompanied by stuttering, for those curious).