IOMeter – 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.

We are running new version of IOMeter, but with a similar configuration as compared with prior versions (i.e. compressibility of data, etc), as to maintain consistency across the test data pool.

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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.

Regarding why we use this test as opposed to single-tasker tests like 4KB random reads or 4KB random writes, well, computers are just not single taskers. Writes take place at the same time as reads. We call this mixed-mode testing, and while a given SSD comes with side-of-box specs that boast what it can do while being a uni-tasker, the tests above tend to paint a very different picture.

The new RevoDrive 350 does well here. IO's build impressively high in comparison to other devices, but SandForce controllers perform relatively poorly at lower QD figures, and here we see this is still an issue, as just one Intel SSD 730 SATA SSD is capable of outmaneuvering the RevoDrive at Queue Depths all the way up to 8, which is well beyond light desktop use and into power user territory.

I got a bit of a chuckle out of the SSD 730 actually beating the ioDrive 160 at lower queue depths. SATA SSDs sure have come a long way.

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