Random Performance – Iometer (IOPS/latency), YAPT (random)

We are trying something different here. Folks tend to not like to click through pages and pages of benchmarks, so I'm going to weed out those that show little to no delta across different units (PCMark). I'm also going to group results performance trait tested. Here are the random access results:

Iometer:

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. Intel later discontinued work on Iometer and passed it onto the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL). In November 2001, code was dropped on SourceForge.net. 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.

Iometer – IOPS

Interesting results here. In the web server test, which is mostly reads, the Neutron XT sits among the best SSDs out there – at queue depths up to 4. After that, it essentially flattens out. It does so prior to reaching its SATA throughput limit, indicating the controller is an early limit here. The other charts show a similar leveling off after QD=4, resulting in even lower performance in the mixed R/W workloads.

Iometer – Average Transaction Time

For SSD reviews, HDD results are removed here as they throw the scale too far to tell any meaningful difference in the results. Queue depth has been reduced to 8 to further clarify the results (especially as typical consumer workloads rarely exceed QD=8). Some notes for interpreting results:

  • Times measured at QD=1 can double as a value of seek time (in HDD terms, that is).
  • A 'flatter' line means that drive will scale better and ramp up its IOPS when hit with multiple requests simultaneously, especially if that line falls lower than competing units.

Although we end the latency charts end at QD=8, we can see the XT creeping up with higher latencies than the others in many tests.

YAPT (random)

YAPT (yet another performance test) is a benchmark recommended by a pair of drive manufacturers and was incredibly difficult to locate as it hasn't been updated or used in quite some time.  That doesn't make it irrelevant by any means though, as the benchmark is quite useful.  It creates a test file of about 100 MB in size and runs both random and sequential read and write tests with it while changing the data I/O size in the process.  The misaligned nature of this test exposes the read-modify-write performance of SSDs and Advanced Format HDDs.

Impressive results seen in YAPT here. Although this is a 'misaligned test', the XT plows through, turning in the highest results. What YAPT considers as random appears more sequential to an SSD, and the Neutron XT does very well with bulk sequential transfers.

« PreviousNext »