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.
This mixed workload testing is what shows the true colors of a given controller’s firmware optimizations, and the 520 did not disappoint. We see it outperform *all* other SandForce models across the board. While this was enough to outmaneuver even the OCZ Octane in higher QD regions of the File and Web Server tests, the lower regions show there is only so much you can do with a given controller design. SandForce is known to have a longer data pipeline, meaning that at lower queue depths it sees longer effective latency in handling each transaction. This causes it to fall prey to the Indilinx Everest driven Octane. Even the 320 Series wins at the lowest QD figures, and it does so with half the available bandwidth (3Gb/sec)!
Light desktop usage sees QD figures between 1 and 4. Heavy / power user loads run at 8 and higher. Most SSD’s are not capable of effectively handling anything higher than QD=32, which explains the plateaus.
They command a 20% Price
They command a 20% Price premium vs competitor’s products. not a good buy in my opinion. I just upgraded my system with a 64GB OCZ synapse cache drive. And I am happy and set. BF3 level load fast!
Is it worth upgrading from my
Is it worth upgrading from my 160GB X-25M?
hmm, i dunno. IMO, a SSD
hmm, i dunno. IMO, a SSD upgrade from an SSD is kind of a hard sell 😛 If you have the money and don’t know what else to spend it on, sure it’ll be faster but won’t be as large of a jump in performance as the jump from a hard drive to that X-25M was.
There is a fatal flaw in
There is a fatal flaw in these drives.
If the ATA password is lost there is NO way to reset the drive and it is bricked with no hope!
Unlike other FDE drives, you CANNOT secure erase or reset the password or drive to the factory null state. Worse yet, if you do try to secure erase these drives, the ATA password will be lost and again the drive is dead.
Nobody knows why Intel made this fatal mistake, but they did.