AMD Radeon R7 480GB SATA SSD Full Review – Gaming Barefoot

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.

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.

If you note the signature Barefoot 'zig' seen at QD=4, you'll see that same pattern carries to the Radeon R7 as well. I realize it appears the Radeon R7 is outperforming the Vector 150, but bear in mind we are comparing a 480GB R7 to a 240GB Vector, meaning the R7 has twice the number of dies to distribute the workloads to, which gives it a slight premium on IOPS capability, which shows here. All Barefoot 3 SSDs perform well here, minus the hiccup seen at QD=4, that is.